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THE 


POLITICAL FUTURE 


OP 


ENGLAND. 


BY THE COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT, 

l| 

OF THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 


.Salva 

Libertate potens. 

Lucan. 


FROM THE FRENCH. 


LONDON: 

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 


1850. 





the library 

OF CONGRESS 
WASHINGTON 


LONDON: PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET, 

AND CHARING CROSS. 













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CONTENTS. 


Sect. Page 

I. What is to become of England?. 1 

II. Of what misleads People’s judgment about 

England. 22 

III. The Two Democracies. 31 

IV. Of Democracy in England. 39 

V. The Grounds of better Hope . 53 

VI. What of Aristocracy remains in England .. 59 

VII. On the Law of Entails.99 

VIII. Parliamentary Keform . 116 

IX. The Parliament . 121 

• X. The Schools and the Universities . 139 

XI. Catholicism in England . 165 

XII. Anglicanism . 191 

XIII. The Efforts of English Society against the 

Danger.205 

XIV. Will England democratized remain free ? .. 213 

XV. Qualities which may guarantee to England 
her Liberty, independently of her Aristo¬ 
cracy .226 

XVI. Publicity in England.245 

XVII. England and Spain .258 

XVIII. Conclusion . 263 

b 


























NOTICE. 


The Translator thinks it necessary to state that 
he was induced to undertake the task not from 

any confidence or concurrence in the Author’s 

«/ 

political or religious views, but because the 
work has made a considerable sensation abroad, 
and may afford some useful warnings, if not 
lessons, to ourselves at home. 





























■ 




























THE 


POLITICAL FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 


SECTION I. 

WHAT IS TO BECOME OF ENGLAND ? 

This is a question very generally asked on the 
Continent, and which even in England cannot 
but agitate many a heart. But apart from 
either the speculations of rivalry or the ap¬ 
prehensions of patriotism, there is a third 
class of observers with whom the question is 
of still higher and more universal interest. 
With every one (too few, alas! in number) 
who still professes any respect for the liberties 
of mankind and the dignity of human nature, 
there cannot be a subject of more anxious, 
more vital solicitude, than the future fate of 
England, hitherto the greatest example and 
guarantee of both. 

We cannot conceal from ourselves that 

B 








2 

— 


ENMITY TO ENGLAND— 


Sect. I. 


there prevails at this moment in the world a 
general opinion unfavourable to the security 
of this great nation, to the duration of her 
glorious institutions, and even to the sound¬ 
ness of her political morality. The unbounded 
confidence, the legitimate envy, the passionate 
admiration which she had inspired for more 
than a century to all enlightened and gene¬ 
rous minds, have imperceptibly made room 
for very different sentiments. While the 
ancient and faithful partisans of England, 
and of all that she represents in the world, 
seem less at their ease, her inveterate adver¬ 
saries, increased and encouraged by the acci¬ 
dents of the times, are announcing her decline 
and anticipating her fall. In this point, as 
indeed everywhere else, the partisans of 
despotism and the zealots of democracy have 
a secret and instinctive alliance : they concur 
in the same wishes, and would applaud the 
same catastrophe. Neither can forgive Eng¬ 
land for having been so long an insurmount¬ 
able bulwark against both these extremes. 
Her monarchy, powerful and limited, has 
been too practical a contradiction to the false 


ITS GROUNDS. 


3 


Sect. I. 

v 

logic, the false theories, and the passionate 
ambition of the Absolutists. Her ever-in¬ 
creasing strength, her unbounded and un¬ 
abused liberty, and her unchecked and un¬ 
rivalled prosperity, supply the most conclu¬ 
sive arguments, as well as the most effectual 
resistance, to the savage equality of So¬ 
cialism on the one hand, and on the other 
to that clumsy Despotism which has no other 
expedient for preserving a people from 
anarchy and terror than the depriving them 
of their liberties and their rights. Both these 
parties unite in envying her the glory of 
offering to surrounding nations her example 
as a refuge against either of their shameful 
alternatives. 

Since the failure of the ultra-liberal or re¬ 
volutionary experiments on the Continent, 
England stands alone in the world as an ex¬ 
ample of rational Liberty, and is the object of 
the secret envy of all its enemies. “ When,” 
they say to themselves, “ when shall the world 
get rid of this nightmare ? Who will deliver 
us from this nest of obstinate aristocrats and 
of hypocritical reformers ? When shall we 

B 2 


4 ANXIETY FOR ENGLAND’S DOWNFALL. Sect. I. 

break down the pride of this obstinate people, 
who, defying the laws of revolutionary logic, 
have tbe audacity to believe at once in tra¬ 
dition and in progress—who maintain royalty 
while they pretend to practise liberty, and 
escape from revolution without submitting to 
despotism ? ” 

This impatient anxiety for the downfall of 
England is fomented by many and various 
organs. It advocates at the same time tyranny 
at Naples and spoliation at Madrid. It in¬ 
spired to M. Ledru Rollin his book on the de¬ 
cline of England —La Decadence de V Angleterre. 
It inflames the zeal of all those advocates of 
despotism who mix up every day with their 
gloomy prophecies of the ruin of England, 
stupid and ignorant sarcasms against her 
manners and institutions. 

Any one who cares for the future destiny 
of nations and of liberal principles in Europe 
must take a deep interest in inquiring whether 
these predictions are well founded—whether 
England will be able to overcome the various 
dangers which threaten her, to survive alone 
the general wreck and emerge triumphant 


Sect. 1. 


HER FAULTS. 


5 


from the revolutionary deluge, or whether 
the day is at hand when the united choirs of 
all possible parties—courtiers, demagogues, 
fanatics, sycophants and the apostate parties 
and enslaved nations of the Continent—shall 
combine, in an insulting anthem of triumph, 
over this once great hut now vanquished 
people. 

“ Art thou also become weak as we ? art thou 
become like unto us ? 

“ How art thou fallen from heaven , 0 Lucifer , 
son of the morning! How art thou cut down to 
the ground , which didst weaken the nations ! ”— 
Isaiah, xiv. 10, 12. 

I do not forget that, besides the passions 
thus leagued against her, other, more sober 
men, may also—not indeed wish her ruin, 
but impute to her some more real grievances, 
and doubt, as she appears to do herself, and 
even despair of the vitality of her system, and 
of her ability to fulfil the expectations derived 
from her past history. Yes, to the eyes of 
the true friends of liberty, of those who do not 
confound her cause with that revolutionary 
democracy which basely invites and servilely 



6 


ENGLAND’S ARROGANCE. 


Sect. I. 


accepts the levelling equality of Despotism— 
to critics of that respectable class I will admit 
that England is certainly not without faults, 
and that I may seem to have chosen an unfa¬ 
vourable moment for making her apology. 
The insupportable arrogance of the English 
Diplomacy towards the weak, and of the Eng¬ 
lish Press towards everybody, has raised the 
just indignation of a vast number of reasonable 
men. Still more does the intrusive, aggres¬ 
sive, and dissolving influence exercised by the 
British Government, with respect to the rights 
and the faith of the Catholics in Switzerland 
and in the south of Europe, deserve the repro¬ 
bation of every sincere Christian ; and if I 
did not strictly confine myself in this sketch to 
the political question, it would oblige me to 
renew here the protestations I made else¬ 
where against the lamentable aberration of a 
race so naturally religious. In truth we have 
to deplore that for several years England 
should have so varied her attitude, should 
have passed so quickly from the extreme of 
invectives to the extreme of adulation, should 
have forgotten so much, equivocated so much, 


Sect. I. 


HER ABERRATIONS. 


7 


and so often sacrificed right and liberty to 
her ambition, to her fears, and to her inte¬ 
rests. She seemed to give up completely the 
honour of her free institutions to the pressure 
of the opposite party. This has been the last 
stroke to more than one noble heart amongst 
us ! 

But in political life, short of becoming the 
accomplice of one’s own ruin and of making it 
irreparable, one must not give way to vexation 
or to discouragement, and above all not do so 
when called upon to appreciate a nation which 
has, like France herself, after some sudden 
and incomprehensible falls [ defaillances ], re¬ 
covered herself still more abruptly. We must 
not forget what she has been for two cen¬ 
turies—what she may and what she certainly 
will become again. Between her and our¬ 
selves—between her and those who aspire to 
obtain and deserve the enjoyment of that well- 
regulated liberty that she now monopolises— 
there can be but misunderstandings, and no 
permanent rupture. We have really the same 
wants, the same duties, the same enemies ! Is 
she threatened with the same dangers under 


8 


ENGLAND’S STABILITY. 


Sect. I. 


which we have sunk ? That is the question— 
the only one I propose to answer; and, in 
contradiction to those sinister apprehensions 
and prophecies, I venture to offer myself as a 
witness, impartial in my judgment and confi¬ 
dent in my facts. 

No, England is not on the eve of perishing. 
No, she is not disgusted with her institutions, 
so prolific of good and of glory. No, she has 
not yet fallen so low as to prefer Democracy 
to Liberty, or Equality in servitude to the 
strength, the true independence that she draws 
from the old aristocratic traditions of her go¬ 
vernment. No, she will not follow the example 
of the Continent; and the enemies of freedom 
of speech, freedom of the press, and self- 
government —both Socialists and Absolutists— 
will have to wait a long time before they see 
the day of her apostacy and her ruin. 

It is not, however, without some misgivings 
that I so decidedly advance this opinion. We 
have all had, since 1848, personal and sad 
experience of the vanity of human foresight, 
and the frailty of human reason. Never, 
perhaps, did it please Heaven to defeat more 


Sect. I. HER PEOPLE NOT EASILY ESTIMATED. 9 


egregiously the calculations of wisdom or the 
prospects of power. There is always some¬ 
thing of risk and temerity in speculating on 
the future destiny of any people. It is still 
more so with regard to the English, whose cha¬ 
racter is at once too solid and too complex 
to be superficially or suddenly studied. 

Baron Billow, who was for many years 
Prussian minister in London, told one of 
his countrymen who asked his opinion on 
the country where he had resided so long, 
“ When I had been here three weeks, I was 
ready to write a book on England; after 
three months, the task appeared to me very 
difficult; and now that I have lived here 
three years, I find it impossible. 5 ' 

England is not like those Continental 
gardens or parks, with straight avenues of 
well-trimmed trees, where you look forward 
and backward, to the right and to the left, 
and see on all sides straight alleys, neatly 
gravelled, watered, and watched by a vigi¬ 
lant police. It is a vast and flourishing forest, 
where there are good and had roads, paths 
straight and crooked, charming lawns and 


10 


WHAT ENGLAND REALLY IS. 


Sect. I. 


abominable sloughs, centenary oaks and in¬ 
extricable briars, but where all is spontaneous, 
robust, vigorous, and abounding in every 
part with life and nature. But you must 
explore it, sound it, penetrate it, through and 
through, in all directions and in all seasons, 
to form an idea of what it really is. Even 
then you will never be sure that your idea is 
exact or complete ; but you will at least know 
and feel that there is in it a mass of life, 
strength, and beauty which must indeed one 
day perish like all that is mortal, and may 
to-morrow be consumed by the visitation of 
Heaven, but where nothing indicates as yet 
the rapid decline and early mortality that the 
enemies of England prognosticate for her. 

But before I attempt to justify my impres¬ 
sion by some facts and reasons, I must esta¬ 
blish a fundamental distinction. I mean to 
confine .this sketch to one point—her internal 
condition. I do not venture to criticise, nor, 
above all, to defend her foreign policy. I 
maintain, with regard to him who has for so 
many years directed it, the same opinion that 
I had before the catastrophe of 1848. I then 


Sect. I. FOREIGN POLICY—LOUD PALMERSTON. 11 


already saw in Lord Palmerston, — in the 
champion of Pacifico in Greece, and the 
oppressor of the small cantons of Switzerland, 
—a great contempt for the rights of the weak, 
and a ready ally of revolution against liberty. 
This opinion is amply confirmed by the deep 
sympathy he has since shown for some ideas 
and some institutions, of the popularity of 
which no one before 1848 would have dared 
to dream. The English people have been, it 
must he confessed, his hut too faithful accom¬ 
plices. But apart from this individual in¬ 
fluence, I abandon to the enemies of the 
English people the task of examining her 
foreign policy. I recognise in it hut too well 
the cruel and implacable self-love which 
characterises in history all ambitious nations, 
and, more than all others, the Eomans, 
whom England reproduces so faithfully in 
her greatness, her constitutional liberty, 
her proud selfishness, and her indomitable 
energy. 

One must however admit that her foreign 
policy—deserving of all reprobation when 
abstractedly judged—may appear less culpable 




12 


MILITARY DISORGANIZATION Sect. I. 


when compared with others. Let him whose 
government is guiltless of the same faults 
throw the first stone ! It will not he either 
Austria or Prussia, who, before God and man, 
persevere in the guilty responsibility of the 
division of Poland. Still less Russia, whose 
insatiable and sanguinary avidity has at last 
met with a well-deserved chastisement. It 
will not be even France, where the spolia¬ 
tions and iniquities of the first Empire have 
not altered the prestige of the Napoleonian 
legend. 

Let us then pass over the exterior policy 
of England—saying but one word of her 
position in the present war—to point out the 
error of those who fancied they saw a symp¬ 
tom of her ruin in the disorganization of 
her military services in the Crimea. I admit 
that she herself has made too much noise 
about her own disasters, and that the states¬ 
men on whose shoulders all the responsibility 
has been thrown have submitted much too 
quietly to the reproaches with which they have 
been loaded. It appears to me that their 
defence is obvious and simple; and that the 


Sect. I. 


IN THE CRIMEA. 


13 


real responsibility must fairly be charged on 
unforeseen and unforeseeable events, and as 
the natural consequences of the system volun¬ 
tarily and scientifically adopted by England 
since her Parliamentary reform. The nation 
and the Government had without doubt singu¬ 
larly misunderstood the strength of the ad¬ 
versary they were going to fight on his own 
ground. Undoubtedly they shared the general 
illusion which the first defeats of the Rus¬ 
sians by the Turks had created. Undoubtedly 
they had not calculated all the innumerable 
combinations of time, sickness, distance, and 
the elements. The genius of foresight had un¬ 
doubtedly no seat in the Cabinet. But what 
right, after all, have the English people to 
wonder at and find fault with general results 
for which they ought to have been as well 
prepared as their ministers? England has 
not had, as France has in Algeria, an incom¬ 
parable school, where our army has been for 
twenty years, guided by illustrious generals, 
inspirited by the examples of princes, young, 
gallant, and modest—an army practised in all 
the most laborious exercises of war, and ex- 



14 


ENGLISH AND FKENCH 


Sect. I. 


posed to the vicissitudes of the most change¬ 
able climate, but supported by our admirable 
civil administration \intendance ], which has 
been created altogether since 1835 from the 
ranks of our officers, who, having brought 
to those civil duties their military tradition 
of high honour and severe probity, have 
learned to surmount every local and material 
obstacle, and to combine activity with order, 
energy with integrity, under the salutary 
control of an implacable publicity. No 
other army in the world could begin a cam¬ 
paign with the advantages insured to the 
French army by this magnificent legacy of 
the Constitutional monarchy. 

But England might console herself for this 
inferiority with the recollection of the various 
efforts of a different nature in which she had 
chosen to employ her long interval of peace. 
She had deliberately, obstinately, and syste¬ 
matically reduced her military establishments, 
her arsenals, her artillery, her depots, below 
the level which the experience of the past 
and the great authority of the Duke of Wel¬ 
lington advised her to maintain. But it was 


Sect. I. 


SERVICES CONTRASTED. 


15 


for the purpose of giving herself up entirely 
and without reserve to the immense develop¬ 
ments of a new policy, of which the imme¬ 
diate objects were seductive, and the remote 
results incalculable—it was to emancipate the 
negroes of her colonies at the ransom of 
twenty millions sterling, to be paid by the 
mother-country—it was to abrogate the corn- 
laws, and to realise cheap living more than 
had been done or attempted in any other 
country—it w T as to suppress or diminish in¬ 
numerable taxes on all the necessities and 
pleasures of life — it was to diminish her 
national de’ht, whilst all the countries on the 
Continent were increasing theirs. Such is 
the true balance-sheet of the savings and the 
expenditure of the English budget since 1814; 
and she may well feel, both in the design and 
the results of her peace policy, consolation for 
the mistakes of a first campaign, undertaken 
without reflection or foresight, but which 
nevertheless has shown the solidity, the pa¬ 
tience, the discipline, and the imperturbable 
courage of the English soldier. 

The first efforts of England in her wars on 




16 


FORTITUDE AND PERSEVERANCE. Sect. I. 


the Continent have been generally unsuc¬ 
cessful ; hut that has been to her only an addi¬ 
tional motive for perseverance and constancy 
in the task she had undertaken. Except in 
naval fights, the history of her prodigious 
struggle against the Revolution and the Em¬ 
pire offers nothing hut a long series of re¬ 
verses, until the genius of the Duke of Wel- 
lington came at last to crown with success her 
irresistible fortitude and perseverance. It is 
because England would not allow herself to 
he discouraged by the lamentable campaigns 
of the Duke of York in 1794 and 1799, or by 
the disastrous retreat of Sir John Moore in 
1808, that it was given to her at last to 
triumph over the greatest captain of modern 
times. Whatever may be the fortune of the 
present war, one may feel well assured that 
England will put forward all the energy 
and perseverance which characterise her 
history and her national temper, in addition 
to the activity, the natural consequence of 
free institutions. She will exhibit once more, 
as she did from 1792 to 1814, the striking 
fact that criticism, discussion, the most un- 


Sect. I. CHANGES IN MILITARY SYSTEM. 


17 


limited publicity—the daily, the incessant 
intervention of the press, and of parliamen¬ 
tary debate, the nse and even the abuse of 
every form of popular intervention—do not 
impair the strength of a people worthy of 
being free, or the vigour, elasticity, and con¬ 
stancy which are the conditions and the gua¬ 
rantee of victory and ultimate triumph.* 

Her political institutions supply her with 
all necessary means to introduce promptly 
and efficaciously into the organization of her 
army whatever changes are required by the 
march of time and the progress of her 
rivals, and against which custom and routine 
never will prevail.. I do not say that she 
will be forced to establish the conscription 
in a country so much attached to indivi¬ 
dual liberty, but assuredly the present war 
will bring some important modifications in 


* I desire no other proof of this than the resignation with 
which all England supports the immense income-tax, which was 
re-established solely to meet the wants of the present w T ar, besides 
the enormous amount of two subscriptions for the families of the 
soldiers in the Crimean army. On the 20th of October last these 
subscriptions had reached the sum of thirty-five millions of 
francs (1,388,069/.). 


C 



18 


BRITISH AND FRENCH 


Sect. I. 


her military system. The English army has 
to this day the virtues and faults of all 
aristocratic armies. When we read the 
letters from the English camp in such num¬ 
bers, written with such complete liberty, and 
published with such courageous candour, we 
might believe them to be written by our own 
gallant men of times gone by, who, after 
having been victorious at Marignan and at 
Cerisolles, could not endure the dulness of 
their winter quarters on the soil of the 
enemy, and hastened to come hack to the 
Court or to their estates, where they awaited 
the signal of another battle. By its heroic 
bravery, by its personal composition, and by 
the too great distance between the soldier 
and the officer, as also by the slowness of its 
movements, by its annoyance and impa¬ 
tience at the prolonged fatigues of the 
modern strategy,—lastly, by the difficulty it 
finds in getting through all the cares and 
troubles of a camp life, the British army is 
too much like what our armies were in the 
time of Francis I. or Louis XIY. These 
have indeed honoured the name and the fia^ 

O 



Sect. I. 


ARMIES CONTRASTED. 


19 


of France, but they could bear no comparison, 
except on tbe field of battle, with our modern 
legions, inured to all fatigues, accustomed 
to create to themselves in the bivouac all the 
resources of domestic life, and in whom a 
severe and intelligent discipline has abated 
nothing of the incomparable valour of their 
fathers. 

But the English know and understand their 
deficiencies. We may be sure that they will 
not despair, but look about and find the 
remedy ; and when once found, the admirable 
mechanism of their constitution will enable 
them to apply it with the energetic resolution 
and practical efficacy which have never failed 
them. 

This reminds me of a page too little known 
of an author* of whom a premature death has 
deprived the French press, and which illus¬ 
trates my subject too well not to be mentioned 
here :— 

“ In the mortal struggle against the Re- 


* M. Jules Maurel, who published at Bruxelles, in 1852, a 
remarkable work entitled Le Due de Wellington. 




20 


ENGLAND’S INSTITUTIONS 


Sect. I. 


public and the Empire, the essential strength 
of England was in her Institutions. The 
British Government carried on war for two- 
and-twenty years, by bringing in aid of it all 
the resources of liberty, amidst the clamorous 
opposition in Parliament and the press, in the 
face of mob-meetings, reform petitions, street 
riots, and broken windows, without sacrificing 
one tittle of its legitimate rights, and without 
thinking of yielding in a single instance, 
either to its internal or external assailants. . . 

“ The dishonesty of party feeling, the in¬ 
justice and self-interest of parliamentary 
opposition, the daily excitements of the popu¬ 
lar assemblies, and hardly less frequently 
of the electoral hustings, were no less useful 
to it than its intelligence and its patriotism. 
At a time when the Continent could not 
boast of a single independent voice, or one 
free printing-press, every passion, good as 
well as bad, was incessantly kept alive in the 
British empire, and unconsciously contributed 
to the same end. No one in England could 
be either a deceiver or a dupe above a day. 
This movement and noise, which betrayed 


Sect. I. THE SOURCE OF HER STRENGTH. 21 

Napoleon into thinking that England was 
always on the point of exploding like a barrel 
of gunpowder, was only the life of a free 
people. The barrel of gunpowder still re¬ 
mained where it was, to be at last directed 
against himself; and it now turns out that it 
is the very sapient, docile, and amiable nation 
on this side of the Channel which amuses 
itself in those explosions which Napoleon 

prognosticated for their neighbours. 

“ On the Continent, victories are exagge¬ 
rated and defeats are concealed or palliated; 
in England, the most indubitable success 
always finds jealous and malicious censors; 
and yet it is very evident that neither the 
tumult of public meetings, the irritation of 
parliamentary opposition, nor the indiscretion 
of the press, lessened in any degree the con¬ 
fidence of the generals or the bravery of the 
soldiers.” 



22 


UNIVERSAL PUBLICITY. 


Sect. II. 


SECTION II. ’ 

OF WHAT MISLEADS PEOPLE’S JUDGMENT ABOUT 

ENGLAND. 

Let us how turn our attention to the main 
object that t propose to myself—an appre¬ 
ciation of the internal condition of England ; 
and begin by recognising the fact we have 
been just now intimating, and which is at 
once the essence of her national existence, and 
the source of the common mistakes of those 
who attempt to judge her. Everything there 
is discussed, criticised, and disputed without 
reserve. Everything is done under the fullest 
expansion of light and noise. Nothing escapes 
that universal law of Publicity. Religion, 
politics, war, legislation, administration—one 
and all must pass and repass daily through 
that popular sieve. Strangers who live alto¬ 
gether in another sphere are at first astounded 
and alarmed at such a sight. They judge 



Sect. II. 


ERRONEOUS CONCLUSIONS. 


23 


of wliat would happen to them, and their 
neighbours, and their governments, if put to 
the same trial, and from it they come to con¬ 
clusions entirely erroneous, but which they 
still go on repeating over and over again, in 
spite of the thousand-times-repeated contra¬ 
dictions of experience. To him who lives in 
a dungeon utterly dark, a ray of light coming 
in through the chink of a door is enough 
to dazzle and deceive his sight: to him wdio 
has enjoyed a long interval of quiet and 
silence, a trifling noise becomes annoying : 
to him who has never been on the sea a 
slight squall seems a hurricane. But the man 
who bustles through life in the light of day, 
in the midst of noise and labour, or of the dan¬ 
gers of the sea, wonders how any one can be 
dazzled or startled with such petty accidents. 

The first impression of an inexperienced 
person, or of a child, entering a large manu¬ 
factory, is to wonder how one can breathe— 
how order can be maintained, in the midst of 
so crowded a population, of such constant 
motion and unceasing noise ; how the mind 
and the nerves can bear the racket of those 


24 REAL CONDITIONS OF LIFE. Sect. II. 

whirling wheels, grinding saws, creaking 
screws—with the discordant whistle of the 
engine, the nauseous smell of grease, the 
blinding clouds of smoke; and yet all goes on 
smoothly—all comes right—all succeeds ; and 
out of this apparent confusion—this deafening 
din—this swarm of men, come master-works 
of ingenuity, mechanism, and industry the 
arms and instruments which insure the victo¬ 
ries of our soldiers, or the prodigies of ele¬ 
gance and taste which serve to adorn our 
wives and daughters. 

Such are, however, always and everywhere, 
the real conditions of life—of true life—of 
busy life—the only life worth living for! 
That activity which is the strength of indi¬ 
viduals, is also the strength of nations— 
habits of danger, constant effort, liberty of 
motion. Who has ever dreamt of life with a 
constant shade over the eyes, and with cotton 
in the ears, and no support but a staff held by 
the hand of a master ? When I see a man 
in that condition, I pity and respect the 
infirmities of old age, but I do not admit it to 
be a fair sample of human existence; and 





Sect. IT. 


SOURCE OF MISTAKES. 


25 


when you show me a whole nation, not only 
fallen into this state, but boasting of it as the 
most perfect form of society, I fly from it at 
least in heart and mind, and my spirit takes 
its flight, to those happier regions (too rarely 
to be found) whose people have long since 
emerged from the swaddling-clothes of infancy, 
without yet thinking of laying themselves 
down on the bed of decrepitude. 

Another source of frequent mistakes in a 
foreigner’s opinion of England is, the ill that 
all the English love to say of one another, of 
themselves, of their country, of their laws, of 
their Government. They are like those im¬ 
patient and querulous grands seigneurs , who, 
while they are perfectly convinced of their 
own grandeur, of their superiority in every¬ 
thing, affect to make very little account of 
whatever belongs to them. Such fits of 
ostentatious humility last until some impru¬ 
dent bystander takes my lord at his word, 
and echoes back or acts on his lordship’s 
complaint or depreciation; then the noble 
grumbler wflll draw himself up, resume his 
self-satisfaction, and seldom fail to make his 


26 


GRUMBLERS AT EVERYTHING. Sect. II, 


too complaisant respondent unpleasantly 
sensible of his mistake. Thus it is in the 
nature of nations; the freer and more con¬ 
fident they feel in their own stability, the 
more ready are they to affect exaggerated 
apprehensions of any inconveniences and 
difficulties they may happen to be under : like 
those young men who, though full of life and 
activity, pretend, at the first disappointment 
they meet with, to despair of everything, 
and declare that they are disgusted and tired 
of life, perhaps at the very moment when 
they are about to attain the object of their 
affection or ambition. 

All these grumblers may perhaps be sin¬ 
cere, but they are ridiculous ; and though 
such complaints may sometimes be the mere 
wantonness of a superabundance of youth 
and strength, they sometimes degenerate into 
serious mischief. France herself, under her 
parliamentary tyranny, indulged in the me¬ 
lancholy amusement of self-slander, but has 
not had the good fortune to find much con¬ 
solatory contradiction. We all have said so 
much ill of ourselves to ourselves, that we 


Sect. II. PROPHECIES OF ENGLAND'S RUIN. 27 


have at last been taken at our word, and we 
are treated, especially in England, as a 
people absolutely incapable of producing or of 
keeping any liberal institution. The English¬ 
man takes good care not to come to the same 
conclusion with regard to himself; he feels 
himself safe from those sudden emotions of vex¬ 
ation and desj)ondency which overpower us; 
he feels that he is not living in a tent, liable 
to be blown down by any accidental failure of 
a rope or a peg. He knows that his house 
is not made of glass, and that he may throw 
stones at it with impunity. He knows, from 
the experience of the past, that England may 
amuse herself in this way without danger, 
and that for nearly two centuries her journal¬ 
ists, her pamphleteers, frequently her orators, 
and sometimes even her greatest writers, 
have not been ashamed of washing their 
dirty linen in public. 

It is impossible for any one ever so little 
acquainted with the political history of Eng¬ 
land not to smile at the futility of the grounds 
on which we hear periodically announced the 
near and inevitable ruin of this last asylum of 


28 PROPHECIES OF ENGLAND’S RUIN. Sect. II. 


modern liberty. Now it is a formidable meet¬ 
ing, where some speakers of more or less 
notoriety have held seditious language against 
the sovereign; then again it is a crash of 
broken windows in some aristocratic quarter 
of the town ; now it is the tumultuous assem¬ 
blage of a hundred thousand individuals, with 
accompaniments of shoutings, banners, and 
processions; then, again, it is the press, teeming 
with seditious invectives against all the men 
and all the things supposed to be most ho¬ 
noured and revered by the British people. But 
they forget that all this is no novelty—that 
it has always been so since England has been 
free — since she has accepted the inconve¬ 
niences and distortions of liberty together 
with its inseparable and incomparable benefits. 
In 1780, in the best days of the aristocratic 
government and of the most splendid elo¬ 
quence of the English Parliament, London 
was in the power of a low mob, who opened 
the prisons and burnt the houses of several 
of the principal persons in the kingdom. In 
1830, fifteen years after the battle of Waterloo, 
the windows of the Duke of Wellington were 



Sect. II. 


DISCONTENT INNOXIOUS. 


29 


broken ; it was on this occasion that he put 
up those shutters we still see to his windows, 
to stand the artillery of the mob. A few 
years later, O’Connell assembled in the open 
air one hundred thousand Irishmen, thrill¬ 
ing with passion under his master hand, and 
disposed, as everybody believed, to throw 
themselves headlong at a nod from him into 
all the perils of a civil war. And while these 
actual commotions were going on, and before 
as well as after, eloquent voices, well listened 
to and admired, were denouncing the national 
institutions as snares, the Parliament as a 
house of ill fame, the Aristocracy as a class of 
oppressors and jobbers, and the English people 
as an ignoble mass of dupes and slaves, crushed 
under taxation and affronts by an insatiable 
oligarchy. All this has been said and re¬ 
peated on all subjects and at all times ; all 
this has been said, and perhaps believed; all 
this will be said, and perhaps believed again; 
but all has passed, and will pass, like a shower 
or squall, which, however violent, does little 
or no permanent damage. But with all his 
affected modesty and with all these ugly ap- 


30 


DISCONTENT INNOXIOUS. 


Sect. II. 


pearances and alarming incidents, the English¬ 
man is not a whit the less persuaded that his 
country is the first country in the world; he 
does not say so till he is contradicted, but he 
believes it, and for doing so he has some very 
good reasons, and it only rests with himself 
to make these reasons still better. 


Sect. III. GRADUAL TRANSFORMATION. 


31 


SECTION III. 

THE TWO DEMOCRACIES. 

Here is, then, the problem which we have 
to solve :—Will England be able to stand 
erect and secure in the midst of a general 
European commotion ? and will she remain 
then absolutely what she is to-day ? To 
the first of these questions we may boldly 
answer Yes; and to the second, No. England 
possesses, more than any other nation in the 
world, the essential conditions of social, moral, 
and material life; but she will live, as she has 
always lived, in a gradual transformation, 
mixing up, with an instinctive art and a mar¬ 
vellous sagacity, traditionary exjDerience and 
prudence with the active spirit of advance, 
and blending the most comprehensive atten¬ 
tion to general interests with a scrupulous 
care of the social rights and the individual 
liberty of the meanest of her citizens. 


32 


TWO DEMOCRACIES. 


Sect. III. 


The steady progress and the ultimate tri¬ 
umph of Democracy are now-a-days facts as 
incontestable and as evident as the progress 
and the triumph of absolute monarchy from 
the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. De¬ 
mocracy governs everywhere, though it may 
not yet reign everywhere. It is foolish not 
to confess its victory; foolish also to oppose 
it, so long as it does not become oppression, 
so long as it does not carry with it some con¬ 
sequences incompatible with one’s conscience 
and good sense. 

But it is too evident that there are on 
the great stage of the world two democracies. 
There is that democracy which recognises the 
laws of honour and equity, which has con¬ 
fidence in the power of truth and of justice, 
which only requires, to insure their triumph, 
liberty to assert them, which has already re¬ 
moved all those injurious and unjust barriers 
which intercepted the masses of mankind from 
the enjoyment of all the rights and all the 
benefits to which they are entitled by nature. 
It has insured to all, equality before the law, 
under taxation and before the enemy, with 


Sect. III. 


TWO DEMOCRACIES. 


33 


accessibility to all employments, emoluments, 
and honours; and these conquests, thank God, 
insured to us for ever, are at least as dear, 
and much more necessary to us than they are 
to our antagonists. This democracy desires 
the public man to be, first of all, the son of 
his own works; but it also requires intelli¬ 
gence and virtue to be the principal conditions 
of the exercise of power, and by that it obliges 
itself to recognise all legitimate superiority 
and to respect it when known. 

This democracy, whatever may be the form 
it chooses to take, whether it be constitutional 
monarchy or moderate republicanism, has al¬ 
ready for its success the wishes and the help 
of all well-thinking and well-informed men. 

But there is another democracy, jealous, ran¬ 
corous, furious, the daughter of Envy, which 
Bossuet has so well illustrated as “ the dark 
and secret product of pride and weakness Its 
genius consists in contesting and destroying 
all the superiorities which arise out of the 
nature of things such as the historic existence 
of mankind constitutes and proclaims them. 
It is the enemy of all that is lasting, of 

D 


34 


TWO DEMOCRACIES. 


Sect. 111. 


all that is solid, of all that resists, and of 
all that increases and improves. It denies 
the gradual progress of liberty; it insults its 
own natural allies; it persecutes especially 
with an implacable ingratitude the monarchs 
who have either introduced it or lent them¬ 
selves to it; it renders the life of nations a 
perpetual storm, and it drives them to look 
for a refugee in the first shelter or harbour 
which presents itself, and to give themselves 
up as slaves or hostages to any one who can 
save them from the wreck. 

Thanks to Heaven, and be it said to the 
honour of humanity, this democracy is not 
the only one that w r e can imagine or have 
seen, but it is, alas! the only one that the 
modern democrats on the Continent have 
known how to establish and exercise during 
their short triumphs. With them it is not 
a liberal, but an exclusive democracy, which 
must inevitably lead to that exclusive power 
which constitutes despotism. And when the 
work is done, have we not always seen the 
revolutionary democracy console itself for its 
disappointments and miscalculations by hook- 


Sect. III. 


TWO DEMOCRACIES. 


35 


ing itself on to the triumphs of Force, and in 
working them up to its own profit? Does 
it not always coalesce with what is now un¬ 
derstood by the term absolute monarch—to 
proscribe and suppress everywhere true and 
natural liberty, stigmatising it sometimes as 
an aristocracy, sometimes as a conspiracy ? 
Do not such an exclusive democracy and such 
an absolute monarchy exhibit an equal en¬ 
mity against all real inde23endence, against all 
that stands by its own strength, against all 
that lives by its own spirit ? Have not that 
exclusive democracy and that absolute mon¬ 
archy substituted mechanical, artificial, and 
ephemeral restrictions for the moral, natural, 
and traditional guarantees ? and have they 
not everywhere condemned the value and 
dignity of the individual man to be absorbed 
by and confounded in the State ? Do they 
not simultaneously practise ostracism against 
capacity, courage, and honesty ? Have they 
not both as their fundamental principle the 
repudiation of the only government really 
legitimate and natural—that of men worthy 
to govern by their superior position, talents, 

i> 2 


36 INTERESTS OF TRUE LIBERTY. Sect. III. 

and virtues ? Do they not both set up as a 
standard, without an appeal, the ascendency 
of numbers —that is to say, the right of the 
strongest, even in the utmost excesses of 
blindness and brutality ? 

We suppose of course, after all that we have 
seen, that there is nobody now-a-days so inex¬ 
perienced as not to see distinctly how different 
the interests of true liberty are from the re¬ 
sults of revolution. A great authority has 
spoken on that point :—“ Dorit you see” said 
Napoleon I. to Thibeaudeau in 1802,* “ that it 
is the enemies of the Revolution who plead most 
warmly in favour of political liberty ?” Ten 
years before that, one of the men who had 
most contributed to deprive the glorious 
movement of 1789 of its legitimate and 
liberal character, predicted, in these words, 
what would he the end of the revolution of 
which he had been so eloquent a champion : 

“ Another step, and the government can 
no longer exist, or must he totally concen- 

* After the Senat, us-Con suite of the 16th Tliermidor. See the 
Memoires de Thibeaudeau, Conventionnel , Conseiller d'Etat ., 
Senateur. 



Sect. III. 


PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY, 


37 


trated in the executive power of one. I see 
in the distance Despotism smiling at our little 
measures, at our little views, at our little 
passions, while it builds slyly on our mistakes 
and follies its future expectations. What was 
called the Revolution is accomplished. Our 
people will no longer submit to their old 
despots; but if we do not take care, they are 
ready enough to create for themselves new ones, 
whose power, more recent and more popular, 
will be a thousand times more dangerous.”* 
Let us then fairly acknowledge the truth : 
the progress of democracy is the leading fact 
of modern society, hut it is also its greatest 
danger, and from this danger no country has 
as yet been able to escape. To restrain and 
guide democracy without debasing it, to regu¬ 
late and reconcile it with a liberal monarchy or 
a conservative republic—such is the problem 
of our age; but it is a problem which has 
been as yet nowhere solved, except in Eng¬ 
land. The fact and the danger exist in 
England as everywhere else ; but, whilst on 


* Adrien Duport, Assemblee Constituante, May 17, 1791. 



38 


PROGRESS OF DEMOCRACY. 


Sect. III. 


the Continent the victories of Democracy 
have everywhere ended in the sacrifice of 
liberty—have everywhere forced the people to 
vacillate between the humiliating alternatives 
of anarchy and despotism, everything an¬ 
nounces that in England its progress will 
conciliate itself with the stability of right, 
with the maintenance of ancient liberty, and 
with the respect due to individual dignity. 
If it should be so, as we firmly believe, Eng¬ 
land, after having alone amongst the great 
nations of Europe preserved her honour and 
her public life from the despotic encroach¬ 
ments of the last two centuries, will have the 
glorious privilege to see the ark of Eights 
and Liberty override the deluge with which 
the revolutionary democracy threatens to 
drown and bury ours. 



Sect. IV. 


LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE. 


39 


SECTION IV. 

OF DEMOCRACY IN ENGLAND. 

Let us now satisfy ourselves as to the symp¬ 
toms of the disease before we venture to point 
out a remedy. I need not repeat, that I do 
not consider as an evil that which many, both 
advocates and adversaries, of revolutionary 
democracy too often confound with it: I mean 
the progress of the natural rights of the 
people, their equality before the law, their 
well-being and instruction, and the emanci¬ 
pation for all religious consciences from all 
secular restraint. These all are the works 
of liberty, and not those of revolutions, and 
liberty alone can be their guarantee and safe¬ 
guard ; it alone can prevent these great bene¬ 
fits being perverted into wrong—at first the 
seeds, and afterwards the essence and justi¬ 
fication of despotism. 

Thanks to liberty, it is by the natural 



40 


IMPOSSIBILITY OF MAINTAINING Sect. IY. 


motion of our minds, by the irresistible march 
of intellect, by the contact, now become so 
general, of races and individuals, that light 
has been thrown on a great number of points 
that were left for a long time in the dark. 
Things that for ages appeared natural, and 
just, and simple, are now exposed in all their 
real iniquity, and are become impossible to 
maintain in spite of the resistance of com¬ 
promised interests and of narrow and preju¬ 
diced minds. If proud and free England 
could only maintain her constitution by the 
exclusion of the Catholics from all political 
rights, by the preservation of the rotten 
boroughs, and by taxing the bread of the poor 
to the profit of the rich, she would be 
unworthy of holding the place that none can 
dispute to her among all free nations. But 
those iniquities, when once understood and 
pointed out, could not survive the judiciously- 
prolonged effort of the conscience of the 
public, and let us say so with a retrospective 
pride, they could not eo-exist in the neighbour¬ 
hood of a France where there existed at that 
time the most scrupulous equality before the 


Sect. IV. 


OLD ABUSES. 


41 


law, as well as true liberty both political and 
religious. 

The worst enemies of the aristocracy could 
alone wish it to retain the odious responsi¬ 
bility of the maintenance of those old abuses. 
The heads themselves of the aristocracy felt 
this ; the Duke of Wellington, Lord Grey, 
and Sir Robert Peel undertook at the right 
moment, and with firm and energetic hands, 
to prune the old tree, to cut off its dead 
branches, and restore to it its life and vigour. 
Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, 
and the Abolition of the Corn-Laws have not 
been victories gained by the democracy—they 
have been the glorious and legitimate con¬ 
quests of reason, justice, and social charity. 

But, distinct from and independent of the 
spirit of justice and liberty which has gained 
these victories, there is, it must be confessed, 
in the hearts of the present generation a 
deep and impetuous under-current of revo¬ 
lutionary spirit; this revolutionary spirit very 
often helps by its irresistible force the achieve¬ 
ment of some great struggle, with whose 
origin and real motive it has no concern. 



42 


REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT. 


Sect. IV. 


But it survives those struggles, always goes 
far beyond the wholesome object, and becomes 
the most insatiable, implacable, and formid¬ 
able instrument of mischief that exists on 
earth. 

What shows the progress of this spirit in 
England, and proves its secret and terrible 
strength, is not the ebullitions which always 
appear on the surface of the great caldron,— 
it is not those insignificant riots which happen 
here and there,—it is not the seditious invec¬ 
tives of this or that newspaper, or of this 
or that mob orator. There are other symp¬ 
toms of the disease, and of a much graver 
nature. 

First, it is that exaggerated irritation of 
public opinion, much deeper even than loud, 
during the first months of the Crimean expe¬ 
dition. It is the nature of an unwholesome 
democracy not to be able to support adversity ; 
and the first symptom of the encroachment of 
that spirit of disorder which ends in the de¬ 
basement and the ruin of great nations, is not 
to know how to explain, except as the results 
of treason or incapacity, the variable and in- 



Sect. IY. 


REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT. 


43 


evitable chances of war. England did allow 
herself last winter to he thus touched hy one 
of the radical infirmities of democracy. She 
forgot that the distinctive character of free 
and aristocratic governments is to he cool and 
collected in good as well as in had fortune, 
as Rome was in presence of Hannibal and 
Pyrrhus, and as England herself under the 
two Pitts. 

Another symptom, still more serious and 
lasting, manifests itself in the general tone 
and style of the literature of the day. Books 
and newspapers, reviews and pamphlets, prose 
and poetry, history and romance, breathe the 
same spirit of criticising and depreciating the 
higher classes of society and all the ancient 
institutions of the country; and having thus 
touched on the subject of novels, it will not 
be beside our purpose to compare those of 
Dickens with those of Walter Scott, as a cri¬ 
terion of the change of the public mind in 
the last thirty years. In the works of the 
Scotch Baronet there is nothing in any de¬ 
gree antagonistic to monarchical or aristo¬ 
cratic ideas—quite the reverse. While he 


44 


REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT. 


Sect. IV. 


represents with incomparable talent the man¬ 
ners and language of the Scotch peasants 
and middle classes, he has, on the other hand, 
almost always chosen his heroes and heroines 
in the higher ranks. This has not a little 
contributed to the gigantic popularity that he 
enjoyed in England before he won it from all 
Europe. 

On the contrary, the most popular novelist 
of our days takes all his subjects and charac¬ 
ters from the inferior classes ; and the servum 
pecus of imitators have naturally rushed 
after him in the path where he found such an 
unexpected success. 

In other and graver walks of literature, 
even in works of political discussion or his¬ 
torical inquiry, it is indisputable that bitter 
and violent satire against all aristocratic 
habits and ideas is growing by degrees to be 
the string which vibrates the strongest and 
the longest. 

In England, democracy now affects a form 
that it had adopted on the Continent only 
before it knew its own strength, or after 
having suffered many bitter mishaps and 


Sect. IV. HERO-WORSHIP—MR. CARLYLE. 


45 


many humiliating defeats. English literature 
begins to applaud power obtained by violence, 
and it seems to envy those nations who have 
sacrificed their public rights, their history, 
and their honour, to brute force incarnated in 
individual men. 

This abject devotion to human idols under 
the name of heroes—this hero-worship, as it 
is now called—this adulation of triumphant 
violence has found an eloquent advocate in 
Mr. Carlyle, whose admitted talent deserves to 
be mentioned as having more than any other 
attempted to deprave the public mind in Eng¬ 
land, and to destroy the prestige of her ancient 
institutions. After having travestied the 
History of the French Revolution in the 
Rabelais style, where the atrocities of the 
actors and the innocence of the victims are 
confounded and laughed at with a revolting 
and disgusting buffoonery, Mr. Carlyle tried 
to impose on England a sort of Cromwell- 
worship, to begin with . He has many ad¬ 
mirers and many copyists. A number ot 
periodicals have become the echo of his doc¬ 
trine. This adoration of Force—this kissing 


46 


FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XV. 


Sect. IV. 


of the iron hand—is nothing hut a conse¬ 
quence-— apparently paradoxical, but pro¬ 
foundly logical — of the spirit of democracy 
cleverly grafted on the interests and the pas¬ 
sions of the moment. It may help to explain 
certain recent phenomena of popular admira¬ 
tion in England which have astonished the 
world. Some languishing poets make them¬ 
selves the organs and partisans of this admira¬ 
tion and of this sickly envy, in some elegies 
which contrast strangely with the national 
pride which inflamed the poets and prose 
writers of the last century* in all ranks of 
society. We remember that in the reign of 


* Mark the contrast between what is written now in England 
and the' celebrated verses of Lord Lyttelton written in Paris in 
1728 

tc 0 native isle ! fair Freedom’s happiest seat . 

When shall I see thy fields 

When in the shade of laws that long have stood, 

Of fearless independence wisely vain, 

The proudest slave of Bourbon’s race disdain ! 

Yet oh ! what doubt, what sad presaging voice 
Whispers within, and bids me not rejoice; 

Bids me contemplate every state around, 

From sultry Spain to Norway’s icy bound ; 

Bids their lost rights, their ruin’d glories see, 

And tells me these like England once were free ! ” 

In another passage he speaks of France under Louis XY. in these 
terms:— 


“ A nation 




Sect. IV. THE REVOLUTIONARY SCHOOL. 


47 


Louis XIV. the French refugees in England 
published a protestation, entitled 4 The Sighs 
of enslaved France for Liberty .’ In our time, 
if the verses and prose of those panegyrists of 
revolutionary reform were deserving of so 
great an honour, we might form a miscellany 
of complaints, entitled 4 The Sighs of free Eng¬ 
land for Slavery l ’ 

It is not only for the meridian of France 
that the English Radical journals, such as 
the 4 Daily News’ and the 4 Examiner,’ vaunt 


. , . “A nation here I pity and admire, 

Whom noblest sentiments of glory fire, 

Yet taught by custom’s force and bigot fear 
To serve with pride and boast the yoke they bear. 

Whose nobles, born to cringe and to command, 

In courts a mean, in camps a gen’rous band, 

From each low tool of power content receive 
Those laws their dreaded arms to Europe give !” 

Another poet, Akensicle, in an Ode published in 1758, dedicated 
to the country gentlemen of England , well describes the contempt 
he felt for the subjection of Europe, and the contrast between 
the Continental races and the English gentry, who rivalled the 
Romans in their agriculture and political liberty :— 

“ Whither is Europe’s ancient spirit fled ? 

Where are those valiant tenants of her shore ? . . . 

Freeman and soldier was their common name . 

Now in the front of battle charg'd the foe, 

Now in full councils check’d encroaching power. 

But who are ye ? From Ebro’s loitering sons 
To Tiber’s pageants, to the sports of Seine . . . 

Ye lost, ye self-deserted ! 

See rifled nations crouch beneath their rod.” 



48 


THE REVOLUTIONARY SCHOOL. Sect. IV. 


the blessings of a despotism so new , just, 
and intelligent as ours; even on questions of 
their own domestic policy, we find this re¬ 
volutionary school invoking, in contradiction 
to the old institutions of England, the gra¬ 
dual development of bureaucratie and central¬ 
isation—a pernicious system which they know 
full well must infallibly undermine and de¬ 
stroy all the traditional strength and the in¬ 
dependence of their country. We might even 
mention more than one democratic writer who 
has lately addressed to Royalty direct and 
explicit invitations and provocations to the 
Crown to shake off the yoke of parliamentary 
control, promising it the help of the demo¬ 
cracy, recommending a union of the Crown 
and the People, to arrive at a revolution like 
that of Denmark in 1660. It is especially to 
Prince Albert, the Queen’s husband, that 
these provocations are addressed; and some 
people have fancied that a recent speech* 


* Speech of Prince Albert on the 9th of June, 1855, at the 
Trinity House dinner, in proposing the Ministers’ health :— 

“ You find your enemy with all that force which unity of pur¬ 
pose and action, impenetrable secrecy, and uncontrolled despotic 




Sect. IV. THE REVOLUTIONARY SCHOOL. 


49 


pronounced by His Royal Highness, being a 
severe criticism on the English Government 
with regard to the war administration, was 
an indirect answer to these provocations. In 
short, it cannot be denied that a new literary 
and political school is trying to create in the 


power have given, while we have to meet him under a state of 
things intended for peace and for the promotion of that very 
civilisation, the offspring of public discussion, of the frictions of 
parties, and of the popular control on the government and the 
state (hear). 

“The Queen has no power to levy troops, nor has she any at 
her command but such as offer their voluntary services (hear). 
Her government can take no measure for the prosecution of the 
war which it has not beforehand to explain in parliament. Her 
armies and fleets can make no movements, nor even prepare for 
any, without their being publicly announced in the papers. No 
mistake, however trifling, can occur, no want or weakness exist, 
which is not at once denounced, and even sometimes exag¬ 
gerated with a kind of morbid satisfaction (loud and continued 
cheering). 

“ The Queen’s ambassador can enter into no negotiation without 
the government having to defend him by entering into all the 
arguments which that negotiator, in order to be successful, ought 
to be able to shut up in the innermost recesses of his heart (loud 
cheers). Nay, at the most critical position, when war and 
diplomatic relations may be at their height, an adverse vote in 
parliament may in a moment deprive the Queen of the whole of 
her confidential servants. Gentlemen, our constitutional govern¬ 
ment is undergoing a heavy trial, and we shall not get success¬ 
fully through it unless the country will grant its confidence— 
patriotic, intelligent, and self-denying confidence — to her 
Majesty’s government (loud cheers).” 


E 



50 


THE REVOLUTIONARY SCHOOL. Sect. IV. 


English people a spirit of dissatisfaction and 
disgust at its immemorial institutions, a passion 
to ape the democracies of the Continent, and 
a hope of finally concluding one of those 
shameful bargains between a people and its 
Government, in which the result is that the 
Government abdicates its morality and the 
people its honour. 

These morbid tendencies to dishonour—this 
temporary degradation—this insolent audacity 
of paradox, coincides unfortunately with a 
phenomenon which periodically occurs in the 
history of all nations that have a history. 
There are seasons of weakness and prostra¬ 
tion when the political and intellectual genius 
of a nation is eclipsed. In countries deadened 
by despotism, such as Spain since the time of 
Charles Y., these eclipses last for two or three 
centuries. In free countries, like England 
since William III., they last some years. 
However, that which the English people is 
now undergoing disturbs and humbles it. It 
helps the dark efforts of those prophets of 
disorder and of the surrender of individual 
opinion. With a number of superior men in 




V 


Sect. IV. .DEARTH OF GREAT MEN. 51 

various ways, England has not at present 
found any equal to the great men whose 
recollections are still alive in her memory and 
heart. 

That marvellous constellation of orators 
beginning with Chatham and ending with 
Canning, has left nothing but a series of in¬ 
terrupted echoes. Not a single living states¬ 
man can pretend to the authority of Welling¬ 
ton, nor has succeeded to the generous initiative 
of Peel. Except Mr. Macaulay, whose supe¬ 
riority as historian over all his predecessors 
needs no demonstration, even the writers who 
do not meddle with politics have nothing of 
that commanding popularity which in the first 
years of this century became the inheritance of 
By ron, Scott, and Moore. The general level 
of talent, of capacity, of influence, is lowered. 

This is the most certain symptom of the 
progress of democracy, such as it now-a-days 
exhibits itself, by repudiating all individual 
authority and all independent strength. 

We are forced, then, to admit the fact that 
the exclusive authority of former ideas is 
weakening, as is also the prestige of ancient 

e 2 


52 DECAY OF ARISTOCRACY. Sect. IY. 

institutions. In other words, the deeply 
aristocratical character of society and liberty 
in England is wearing out. It is still very 
deeply rooted, and its prestige is still gene¬ 
rally felt; but it is far from being what it 
formerly was. A lord is still a great person, 
great beyond what we can comprehend on 
the Continent; but he is no longer the lord 
of other days. The combination of ideas and 
habits which attached themselves to that dis¬ 
tinction—to that untranslatable title—have 
suffered a similar alteration. It may perhaps 
be a good, perhaps an evil; at all events it is 
a fact. We cannot attempt to deny it, but, 
on the other hand, let us not exaggerate its 
consequences. 


Sect. V. ENGLAND NOT THE SLAVE OF LOGIC. 53 


SECTION Y. 

THE GROUNDS OF BETTER HOPE. 

In the first place England, fortunately for 
her, is not the pedantic slave of logic. She 
has at all times reserved for herself an un¬ 
bounded right to indulge when she'pleases in 
the most glaring inconsistencies. She cares 
little for the strictness of logic when it would 
tend to any sacrifice of her honour, her hap¬ 
piness, or her safety. She does not allow 
herself to be misled by the argumentations of 
chimerical and rigid theorists, nor subjected 
to the pedantic rigour of their conclusions. 
She has at all times estimated at their proper 
value those arrogant and perfidious sophists 
who think to reconcile their dupes and their 
victims to their perdition by telling them, 
like the Satan of Dante— 

Forse 

Tu non pensavi ch’ io lo'ico fossi! 


54 DREAD OF THEORIES. Sect. V. 

It is here that is more particularly observable 
the superior sagacity with which this nation is 
endowed. After having either laid down for 
herself, or accepted from others, a principle, 
she does not therefore think herself obliged to 
be led in its name to visionary experiments 
and an inscrutable abyss. She dreads, and 
with reason, the seductions of theories which, 
in politics more than in anything else, are 
liable to conditions and exceptions. One may 
say that her whole history is that of a con¬ 
stant struggle against the exaggerated conse¬ 
quences of the principles that she had either 
recognized or endured. She, as well as all 
Europe, accepted in the Middle Ages the 
religious and feudal character of royal autho¬ 
rity ; and she has scrupulously preserved its 
terminology up to this day. Here, and here 
only, one still hears, as in the time of Queen 
Elizabeth, of the Queen s possessions, the Queens 
army , the Queen s ships ; here only the highest 
tribunal is called the Queens Bench , the tran¬ 
quillity of the streets the Queens peace; the 
House of Commons itself, Sovereign in reality 
of the country, addresses the throne as Your 


Sect. V. POWER RETAINED BY THE PEOPLE. 55 


faithful Commons . Nobody dreams of repu¬ 
diating, as our opposition deputies did fifteen 
years ago, the name of subjects of the Crown; 
but neither does anybody think of sacrificing 
to the Sovereign bis own dignity, conscience, 
or reputation. Whilst in other places doctors 
in law and doctors in theology deduced from 
these historical forms all their theories of 
divine right and royal omnipotence, in Eng¬ 
land good sense and justice have made them 
mere fictions—still preserved out of respect 
to the memory of the times from which they 
have inherited such solid advantages, that 
they are not inclined to part even with their 
forms. The English have left to royalty the 
scenery —the decorative ornaments of pow r er; 
but they have kept the substance for them¬ 
selves, which is surely better than to allow 
oneself to be duped by fine theories—satisfied 
with empty words which either have no prac¬ 
tical meaning, or only serve as pretences for 
the most revolting abuses. 

Some historians relate with complacency 
that a preacher, having iireached before 
Philip II. of Spain that kings had an abso- 




56 PRESENTING THE QUEEN’S SPEECH. Sect. Y. 

lute power over the persons and properties of 
their subjects, was condemned by the Inqui¬ 
sition to a public retractation. This farce, as 
a clever and pious author * justly observes, 
may have comforted and even edified a nation 
passionately enamoured of the despotism 
which was to crush both her moral and 
material greatness; but it did not prevent 
Philip II. from destroying, unblushingly, the 
liberties of Aragon and Belgium, and putting 
to death, without trial and in secret, the most 
illustrious of his subjects, his own son in¬ 
cluded. 

Fiction for fiction, I prefer the English 
system, which to this day obliges the proudest 
Aristocrat or the most ardent Liberal to bend 
the knee before the Queen on her throne, 
when presenting to her the speech that the 
ministers of the parliamentary majority oblige 
her to pronounce, while they choose that 
humble posture to remind Royalty of the 
limits of its power, and of the conditions for 
its duration. 

* M. Albert du Boys, ffistoire du Droit Criminel chez les 
Peuples Modernes, c. 43. 



Sect. V. FIRMNESS AND MODERATION. 


57 


On tlie other hand, after having, by the 
Revolution of 1688, put the public liberties 
under the guarantee of a change of dynasty, 
the B rtish people have vigorously rejected 
the doctrines which have frequently attempted 
to avail themselves of that precedent and 
principle to diminish and humble the influence 
of royalty, then re-established, and to sub¬ 
stitute a republic for the limited and constitu¬ 
tional monarchy. When the English nation 
wishes for a reform, or an advance in any 
direction, it devotes all the energy and the 
incomparable perseverance of the national 
character to obtain it; and there it stops. 
Never, hitherto, has it compromised or dis¬ 
honoured those victories; never has it gone 
beyond its object. It will therefore not imi¬ 
tate those countries where every successful 
movement — liberty yesterday — authority to¬ 
day—begins on the very morrow of its vic¬ 
tory to dig its own grave by the hands of 
the courtiers and logicians of the triumphant 
party, where the proclamation of a principle, 
be it a new one or a revived one, drags im¬ 
mediately after it the destruction of all the 


58 FIRMNESS AND MODERATION. Sect. V. 

checks and counter-weights which were op¬ 
posed to it before its triumph, and which 
would be much more necessary to it after 
the triumph than before. 


Sect. YI. 


DEMOCRACY INEVITABLE. 


59 


SECTION VI. 

WHAT OF ARISTOCRACY REMAINS IN ENGLAND. J 

England will then open her doors to De¬ 
mocracy; hut, at the same time, she will set 
limits to its advance. In all the changes 
and institutions implicated in that momentous 
word, all that is wise, legitimate, and neces¬ 
sary will be adopted, and all that is violent, 
excessive, compromising to political liberty or 
personal independence, will be for a long time 
to come thrown back into the category of uto¬ 
pias and factions. Democracy will come, but 
not unquestioned or unresisted : it will find 
the most important posts occupied, and the 
garrison on the alert, and will soon see that 
the English Aristocracy is neither blind enough 
nor exclusive enough to afford it the easy and 
dangerous triumphs that the Continental aris¬ 
tocracies have allowed their enemies. 

To understand well the situation of affairs 


60 


THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. Sect. VI. 


across the Channel we must understand what 
this Aristocracy in reality is, and particularly 
what it is not . Although so much has been 
said and written on this subject, we must not 
relax our endeavours to study and to sound 
it, for the political history of the world does 
assuredly not present another example of an 
institution so artfully contrived and so durable, 
so elastic and so energetic. 

It is necessary to bear in mind that the 
English Aristocracy is by no means a body 
animated throughout by the same spirit and 
rigidly framed to one model. It is a body as 
various in form and variable in spirit as life 
itself. It is said that during the Neapolitan 
revolution of 1820 the mob collected under 
the windows of the old King, Ferdinand IV., 
were calling out, “ Sire, a constitution! we 
want a constitution ! ” The King, frightened 
and ready to concede everything till the Aus¬ 
trians should come to his rescue, appeared on 
the balcony and answered them, “ Yes , my 
children , you shall have a constitution ; one , and 
even two if you like J ” If there is in England 
but one constitution, and that one very much 


Sect. VI. 


WHIGS AND TORIES. 


61 


modified of late, and liable to become still 
more so, there are, on the other hand, two 
aristocracies. First there is that of the two 
old parties, the Whigs and Tories, which goes 
on diminishing and transforming itself every 
day. While one of these is in office, the other 
is always on the look-out for the faults and 
mistakes of its rival. It is for ever on the 
watch for any opportunity of displacing and 
replacing the other, and all useful measures of 
reform which it becomes necessary to intro¬ 
duce, all serious dissatisfaction which requires 
to be appeased, are to this rival so many 
steps and strategical means to the conquest 
of Downing Street. Wholesome concessions 
are thus, as it were, put up to auction, and 
the general good is thus produced by the 
competition of conflicting parties. 

During the last few years the Tories have 
shown that they know as well as the Whigs 
how to employ these tactics; and the sacrifice 
of the rotten boroughs and of the corn-laws 
appearing to be henceforth irrevocable, some 
of the most intelligent of them have dedicated 
themselves to the consideration of the ques- 


62 


TORY TACTICS. 


Sect. YI. 


tions regarding the working and indigent 
classes, and make such questions their special 
business. Witness the efforts of Sir John 
Pakington on the question of education, and 
those of Lord Shaftesbury, so successful and 
so meritorious, on the sanitary condition of 
lodging-houses, ragged-schools, the limitation 
of the work of women and children in the 
manufactories, and their absolute interdiction 
from labour in the mines. 

I always see some aristocrat or oligarque 
foremost amongst the movers or auxiliaries 
of every new and useful project. In general 
they are young, but not always. Sometimes 
an ex-minister or a viceroy on the shelf, a 
retired chancellor, or perhaps a duke in the 
plenitude of his age and fortune, disputes with 
the younger debutants these forward parts on 
the stage of the world. But, young or old, 
one may be always sure to find a man of great 
name and consideration at the head of every 
movement that can affect the future condition 
of the country. 

With a sagacity never at fault, this old 
Aristocracy, represented by its younger scions, 


Sect. VI/ TACTICS OF THE ARISTOCRACY. 


63 


knows not only when it ought to concede, hut 
it knows also when to take the initiative of 
the gravest and most fruitful measures. Thus 
it was that young Pitt, before he became at- 
three-and-twenty Chancellor of the Exche¬ 
quer, became the champion of Parliamentary 
Reform; and that his rival, Fox, whose origin 
was more aristocratic than Pitt’s, remained 
all his life at the head of the popular interest. 

These aristocratic aspirants to power occa¬ 
sionally change and interchange their opinions 
or their colours, but there always remains 
some one of their original crew or of their 
order to replace them when wanted. 

Such, after all, is the art of governing man¬ 
kind. It requires great vigilance and constant 
activity, but above all, that self-possession, 
independence, and vitality, that the nobility 
of the other countries of Europe had so 
miserably sacrificed to the puerile vanities of 
court favour and the frivolous enjoyments 
of court life. 

But these party-tactics, clever as they are, 
could not have succeeded if the two great divi¬ 
sions of the English Aristocracy had remained 



64 


THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY * Sect. VL 


l 

inaccessible to the talents, the services, the 
ambitions of the inferior classes of society: 
fortunately even for itself it was not so. 
•Everybody sees, but no one has sufficiently 
appreciated, the admirable mechanism by 
which the peerage opens its ranks and closes 
them again ; how it attracts all the great 
notabilities of the nation—in law, in arms, in 
diplomacy, in finance—without any regard as 
to their origin, whether more or less popular, 
at the same time that it sends back into the 
mass of the people all its collateral branches, 
which, beginning at the younger grand¬ 
children of peers, fall into the general course 
of society, without titles or any distinctive 
marks of their noble origin. 

This constant come and go movement, 
which introduces into the supreme ranks of 
the aristocracy some young and vigorous ele¬ 
ments, while it throws off all that is super¬ 
fluous and useless—which establishes a sort 
of permanent rotation between the people 
and the peerage—is not the result of skilful 
legislation, but the political and social instinct 
of the country. It began in the middle ages. 



Sect. VI. 


PATRICIAN AND POPULAR. 


65 


In fact it is as old as the peerage itself; and 
it is by it that this great institution has 
escaped the evils attending, and inseparably 
united in all other countries with, a powerful 
aristocracy; as in Germany and at Venice. 
It is thus that it remains in England a 
political body at once patrician and popular; 
not an exclusive class narrowly entrenched 
in its own individuality, and condemned to 
perish of inanition and sterile pride. 

Here, undoubtedly, as everywhere else 
when human beings are exposed to the 
temptations of opulence, luxury, and idleness, 
there may have grown up a certain class, 
exclusive, vain, and frivolous, whose preten¬ 
sions, too easily submitted to, are felt, not 
indeed in the direction of political affairs, 
but in their relations with the world and 
the sociabilities of common life. This evil 
is gradually disappearing; and, moreover, 

it has never happened in England that the 

/ 

pride and privileges of the aristocracy to¬ 
wards their inferiors have assumed those 
humiliating forms and produced the deplor¬ 
able results which in other countries have 


66 VALOUR OF THE ENGLISH NOBILITY Sect. VI. 

sown the seeds of incurable animosity in 
the hearts of the middle classes. This is 
explained not only by the permanent fu¬ 
sion, just described, of the younger branches 
of the peerage with the rest of the nation, 
but above all by the habit of the English 
nobility not to reckon equality of birth as 
an indispensable, or even a primary condition 
of their matrimonial alliances. This liberality 
has been no doubt frequently practised on 
the Continent, more especially in France 
under the old regime , but with little success, 
for it never failed to excite either murmurs 
or sneers. It is worthy of remark, that the 
word mesalliance has no equivalent in the 
English language, any more than that of par¬ 
venu; and the idea they express is foreign to 
the manners of the country. Nothing, there¬ 
fore, prevents the old races from renovating 
their blood from these new sources, and, as it 
were, fortifying their old castles by the admis¬ 
sion of those middle classes, who thus obtain 
a direct interest in the duration and glory of 
the ancient edifice. The old stocks may thus 
stretch out their roots into a fresher soil, and 


Sect. VI. SIGNALIZED IN THE CRIMEA. 


G7 


acquire a newer, a healthier, and a more 
brilliant life. This is the main cause of the 
high English nobility’s having maintained an 
invariable dignity, always equal to itself, 
always distinguished for those qualities most 
adapted to the age in which it has lived, and 
to the responsibilities and duties imposed on 
it by times and circumstances. 

But while thus initiated by their national 
institutions to the exercise of all civil duties, 
and to the profitable activity of labour in 
time of peace, the English nobility has never 
ceased to reproduce on the field of battle the 
valour of those renowned ancestors whose 
blood they inherit or whose places they 
supply. The heroic blood which flowed so 
freely on the plains of the Peninsula has 
again been as freely shed in the Crimea. 
The desperate charge of Balaklava was led 
by a man whose peerage is two centuries 
old, and who was long one of the most un¬ 
popular of the aristocrats ; and in those lists of 
killed and wounded published by the English 
Government with a care so scrupulously 
accurate and so consolatory to families, those 

F 2 


68 SYMPATHY OF THE ARISTOCRACY Sect. YI. 


who take pleasure in tracing historical genea¬ 
logies have read with emotion the name of 
the young Earl of Errol, Hereditary Con¬ 
stable of Scotland under a patent dated 1315, 
but now only a captain of infantry, with the 
loss of a hand blown off in the battle of 
Inkermann. 

But that blood which the English aristo¬ 
cracy showed itself so ready to shed -has not 
disarmed its detractors. It was the same 
with the French Noblesse, which even in its 
political humiliation preserved all its here¬ 
ditary valour, and had strewed with its most 
illustrious names all the battle fields of the 
Seven Years’ and the American wars. It had 
no thanks; for when the Revolution tocsin 
was rung, it was enveloped in a common pro¬ 
scription with the monarchy, whose too docile 
victim it had been. 

But the English Aristocracy is not satisfied 
with the glorious privilege to be in the first 
ranks of those who devote their lives under 
the flag of their country. They know that 
there are other battles to be won—formidable 
battles between the old and new interests, 


Sect. VI. WITH THE INFERIOR CLASSES. 


69 


caused by tlie innovations of industry and by 
the march of civilization; and they show 
themselves equal to the conflict—in the per¬ 
sons of many of the youngest or the most 
eminent of its members who enter with an 
intelligent solicitude into all the new ques¬ 
tions of the times, who are sincerely alive to 
the wants and anxious for the moral and 
material improvement of the labouring classes, 
and deeply touched and actively preoccupied 
with the suffering of the indigent. When 
we see the most considerable men of the 
peerage—such men as Lord Grey, Lord Car¬ 
lisle, and Lord Shaftesbury, and the heirs of 
the most ancient and wealthy houses, such 
as Lord Stanley,* Lord Goderich, and so 


* The English newspapers, so little read and so badly trans¬ 
lated in France, have all mentioned the touching scene exhibited 
on the 18th of August last, at the magnificent seat of the Earl 
of Derby at Knowsley, near Liverpool; to which all the mem¬ 
bers of the associations for the education of the working classes 
of the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire had received an 
invitation. The young Lord Stanley, eldest son of the Earl of 
Derby, and heir to the peerage created in 1485 to reward the 
man who had put the house of Tudor on the throne, did to 
these workpeople and to their wives the honours of the paternal 
seat. After having walked about the house and in the park, 
this young man, who is one of the most rising speakers in the 






70 


TACTICS OF THE ARISTOCRACY. Sect. VI. 


many others, devoting, not only their pecu¬ 
niary subscriptions, hut their personal efforts, 
to schools for adults and apprentices, visiting 
provincial towns to give lectures to work¬ 
men on history, and on all natural sciences— 
when we see them in their places in parlia¬ 
ment always the first in the discussions which 
regard the welfare or the education of the 
masses—when we know how affectionately 
grateful the workmen, even of the manu¬ 
factories, are for those marks of sympathy 
from above, we feel full of confidence and 
hope in the futurity of that great nation 
which redeems its imperfections by so many 
virtues, and which struggles against the in¬ 
firmities of its position with such an intelli- 


House of Commons, made them a speech, in which he expatiated 
on the advantages of the association, which comprises 70 affi¬ 
liated institutes , and which puts in circulation from village to 
village 250,000 volumes. After having thanked his guests in 
the name of his father for the honour they had done him, he 
ended with these noble words: “I never have gone over this 
old domain of my fathers, this park and these woods, without 
thinking that something was wanting to their beauty, their 
grandeur, and their picturesque solitude : that something was 
the presence of a number of human faces and of joyous voices. 
To-day my wishes are satisfied.” 



Sect. VI, 


OLIGARCHIES. 


71 


gent courage. People talk of an oligarchy , 
but let us understand the meaning of that 
word. Every government is an Oligarchy in 
this sense—that the number of governors is, 
and must always be, infinitely smaller than 
that of the governed. But that is just as true 
of republics where all the magistracies are 
annual as it is of monarchies where the omni¬ 
potence of one is, or affects to be, founded on 
the consent of all. The true question is, 
whether the governing Oligarchy is ephemeral 
or durable, stupid or intelligent, ojDpressive 
or liberal, sterile or fruitful, and, above all, 
whether it is accessible or inaccessible to the 
legitimate exertions of honour, conscience, 
and capacity. 

Well, then, one may say without fear of 
contradiction that there is not, that there 
never has been, in the world a government 
where access to distinction and power is so 
easy and so sure as it is in England to every 
man who possesses talent and energy, what¬ 
ever his origin, or even whatever his opinions. 
He will acquire them sooner than he would 
anywhere else, and without being obliged to 


72 


MR. LAYARD. 


Sect. VI. 


sacrifice his dignity or his convictions to the 
exigencies of a government, and even with¬ 
out the obligation of binding himself to a 
party. A man who has been much talked of 
recently, Mr. Layard, who professes himself 
the great adversary of the existing oligarchy, 
refutes his own cause by his own example. 
Without protection, without fortune, without 
belonging to the Whigs or to the Tories, after 
having spent some of his early years in ex¬ 
ploring the antiquities of Nineveh, he had 
reached, before he is forty years of age, and 
having but just entered parliament, the very 
high position of Under Secretary of State for 
Foreign Affairs, which he soon resigned, 
but voluntarily and contrary to the wishes 
of two successive ministries. He probably 
thought that his political position gave him 
a right to expect something still higher; and 
whilst waiting for the moment, probably 
very near, when he will reach his mark, he 
enjoys a considerable popularity, and that 
immense notoriety which it is given to public 
men to attain only in representative govern¬ 
ments. 


Sect. VI. 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


73 


It must be confessed that such a career does 
anything hut confirm the complaints that the 
talents of unpatronised individuals are unap¬ 
preciated and unrewarded by the British 
oligarchy. 

The administrative reform , of which this 
gentleman is the champion, and which has 
made so much noise of late, will certainly be 
accomplished. This question is already de¬ 
cided in the minds of all enlightened men. 
They think of it as Wilberforce did of Par¬ 
liamentary Reform at the beginning of this 
century. Wilberforce, the affectionate and 
pious friend of Pitt, said :—“ I am friendly 
to moderate reform at a proper time. The 
true policy of this country is to conciliate 
the honest. A moderate reform would not 
strengthen the democrats’ hands; on the con¬ 
trary. But let us never hope to win the 
democrats; they have ideal grievances and 
ideal advantages; they cry for liberty, but 
what they want is power. The same reason 
which makes me condemn Grey’s makes me 
love moderate reform : Grey’s would enable 
democrats to carry their point, moderation 


74 ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. Sect. VI. 

would prevent them.It is important to 

separate the real enemies of corruption from 
those who make reform a party watchword. . . 
Sure I am that no country was ever the worse 
for adhering to moral principles.”* 

But the administrative reform when carried 
will not have either the good or bad effects 
expected from it. The movement which de- 
velopes itself under this name is the symptom 
of a dangerous tendency in the public mind. 
Formerly the number of public functionaries 
was much smaller than it is now. The func¬ 
tionaries appointed and paid by the state were 
comparatively few, and of little individual 
importance. They inspired neither esteem 
nor envy in the immense majority of the 
people, who could not look to government 
offices, did not want them, and were not dis¬ 
satisfied that the limited number of such 
places should be considered the reward of the 
followers of the aristocracy, or of the rising 
men of the political world. This state of 
things is altered in England as it is in France. 


* Life of AVilberforce, vol. ii. pp. 443, 444, vol. iii. p. 408. 




Sect. VI. 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


75 


The extension of education among the masses, 
by dislocating from humbler walks a vast 
number of individuals, has created so many 
new candidates for government offices; and 
on the other hand, although the slow but in¬ 
contestable progress of administrative cen¬ 
tralisation has increased the number of places 
to be given, it is and will always be infinitely 
less than that of the candidates. Both, how¬ 
ever, are increased and increasing. This is 
the great peril of English society. The evil 
is certainly as yet not near so great as it is in 
the nations of the Continent; but England is 
already launched on that fatal slide. It is 
high time for her statesmen to see that a 
general immoderate pursuit of public office 
is the worst of all social diseases. It ex¬ 
pands throughout the body of the nation a 
venal and servile leaven which has not the 
merit of correcting or excluding, even in 
those provided for, the spirit of faction and 
anarchy. It creates a hungry and greedy 
crowd capable of any violence to satisfy their 
appetite, and ready for any baseness as soon 
as it is satisfied. A people of place-hunters 


76 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


Sect. VI. 


is the lowest of people. There is no ignominy 
that it is not ready to undergo or to perpe¬ 
trate. The true administrative reform would 
then consist in stopping energetically this truly 
democratic tendency which increases the num¬ 
ber of employments, and substitutes agents 
salaried by the government, and removeable at 
pleasure, for duties formerly unpaid, elective, 
or irremoveable—which begins by extending 
indefinitely the influence and intervention of 
the ruling power, and ends by crushing it 
under the weight of its impatient cupidity, 
implacable hatreds, and impotent support. 
Every Englishman who regards the greatness 
and stability of his country should cordially 
unite to repel this Continental precedent—a 
deluge of officials, which will undermine her 
ancient institutions, and end in destroying 
her prosperity, her liberty, and her glory. 

As to the reform which consists in opening 
a wider door to the professions in which the 
intervention of government is indispensable, 
such as the army, the navy, and diplomacy, it 
is one of the necessities of the times, and it 
will make its own way, like all useful reforms 


Sect. VI. 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


77 


in England, gradually and honestly. The 
movement in that direction will not be 
stopped, but checked and regulated, while 
partially conceded. The chief care should 
be not to increase the number of candidates 
out of proportion with that of the places to 
be given. But let us not blind ourselves 
to the fact that in the actual state of things 
in England the struggle is merely between 
two categories of younger sons—those of titled 
families and great landed proprietors, and 
those of the middle classes recently enriched. 
Such was the statement I heard made by a rich 
City merchant, whilst presiding at one of the 
most numerous and noisy meetings ever held 
on the question. He expressed himself thus 
before four thousand persons assembled in 
Drury-lane Theatre :—“ A Lord was telling 
me a few days ago, Sir, if your reform comes 
to pass, what will become of our younger 
sons ? I answered him—My Lord, if it does 
not come to pass, what will become of ours ?” 
This was perfectly well understood, and im¬ 
mensely applauded. We see that the ques¬ 
tion turns entirely on the younger sons, for 




78 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


Sect. VI. 


the eldest sons have generally better things 
to do. There is no harm at all that the 
younger sons of the aristocracy, whose share 
of public patronage has already been much 
diminished, should be obliged to give them¬ 
selves a little more pains than heretofore to 
arrive at a military commission or a diplomatic 
appointment. This will be effected by the 
recent institution of examinations and condi¬ 
tions of admission as preliminary steps to 
public employment. That will not be, any 
more than it has been found in ‘France, a 
complete barrier against incapacity, against 
favouritism, against the mediocrity of heart 
and mind which is the scourge of the modern 
world; but it will certainly be a preservative 
against certain abuses and certain injustices 
which have done much more harm than good 
to the very classes that might expect to profit 
by them. But we shall not for a long time 
to come see in England, what has been 
seen some years ago in France, an old name 
and distinguished birth becoming an obstacle, 
a motive of exclusion to advancement of 
their possessors. With equal merit, the man 


Sect. VI. 


ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM. 


79 


who brings to the present the prestige and 
authority of the past will always be preferred. 
This is all that the English Aristocracy can ex¬ 
pect—that justice it must have, hut only that. 

Nothing can be of more use to the Aris¬ 
tocracy itself than those attacks and agitations 
which warn it of the necessity of being on the 
defensive and of maintaining itself, as well 
from duty as from interest, on a level with the 
advancing progress of the age it lives in. 
“ We require,” said lately one of its most 
illustrious * heads—“ we require every ten or 
fifteen years such a stroke of the whip as this 
to keep us in wind, and to prevent our be¬ 
coming torpid in a treacherous security.” The 
true and permanent interests of the aris¬ 
tocracy will, therefore, not suffer more from 
this administrative reform than they did from 
parliamentary reform, or by the abolition of 
the corn-laws. Its mission is not to perpe¬ 
tuate abuses nor to maintain privileges. The 
immortal Burke, in a letter to the Duke of 
Richmond in 1772, thus defines, in the figura¬ 
tive style which was familiar to him, the true 
character of the English patricians :— 



80 


BURKE 0N THE ARISTOCRACY. Sect. VI. 


“ You,” says he to the Duke, “ people of 
great families and hereditary trusts and for¬ 
tune, are not like such as I am, who, whatever 
we may be by the rapidity of our growth and 
even by the fruit we hear, and flatter our¬ 
selves that while we creep on the ground we 
belly into melons that are exquisite for size 
and flavour, yet still are but annual plants 
that perish with our season, and leave no sort 
of traces behind us. You, if you are what 
you ought to he, are in my eye the great oaks 
that shade a country, and perpetuate your 
benefits from generation to generation. The 
immediate power of the Duke of Richmond, 
or a Marquis of Rockingham, is not so much 
of moment; but if their conduct and examples 
hand down their principles to their successors, 
then their houses become the public reposi¬ 
tories and offices of record for the Constitution 
—not like the Tower or Rolls Chapel, where 
it is searched for, and sometimes in vain, in 
rotten parchments under dripping and perish¬ 
ing walls, hut in full vigour, and acting with 
vital energy and power, in the character of 
the leading men and natural interests of the 
country.” 



Sect. VI. PREPONDERANCE OF THE COMMONS. 81 


It is, however, a great error too frequently 
committed to think that the English Aris¬ 
tocracy consists in the four or five hundred 
families of which the heads have the title of 
Lord, and the privilege of sitting in the 
House of Peers : that is merely the flower, as 
it were, of the aristocracy ; the trunk and 
the roots are elsewhere. If we admit that 
the influence of the House of Lords is di¬ 
minished, it is nothing new, and proves 
nothing, or hardly anything, against the 
strength of the aristocratic element. For 
more than two centuries, that is to say, ever 
since England entered into the real exercise 
of a parliamentary Constitution, the House of 
Commons has been the preponderating force 
in the mechanism of the Government. It 
is nearly a century since the first and the 
greatest of the Pitts lost all his popularity 
and almost all his influence by accepting the 
peerage with the title of Earl of Chatham. 
The importance of the Upper House has 
undoubtedly been decreased since then by ex¬ 
cessive creations, and because some of its 
members have lost great political power by the 


82 


THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 


Sect. VI. 


abolition of the rotten boroughs of which they 
named the representatives. But this House 
remains at bottom what it has long been, and 
what it ought to be, the bond between the 
past and the present—the living archives 
of the Constitution—the image of national 
tradition—and at the same time a check 
on the sometimes too rapid movements of the 
machine of government. Its part remains 
very important; and—the reverse of Lord 
Chatham’s case—the contemporary examples 
of Lord Liverpool, Lord Melbourne, and Lord 
Derby show that public men may become the 
head of the government, and remain there 
after having quitted the House of Commons, 
or even, like Lord Aberdeen, without having 
ever belonged to it. But, once more, it is not 
there that resides the vital force of the Aris¬ 
tocracy ; and I will even go so far as to say 
that if the House of Lords were to be again 
suppressed, as it was under Cromwell, the 
external form of the English constitution 
would undoubtedly be altered in its compo¬ 
sition, but its essence would remain the same, 
and, above all, its aristocratic character and 





Sect. VI. POWER OF THE ARISTOCRACY. 


83 


the aristocratic spirit of the nation would 
not be changed. The Aristocracy is every¬ 
where powerful in England, because there is 
everywhere a feeling of independence and of 
energy, and of personal estimation, which is 
the essence of the aristocratic principle, the 
principle of nature and common sense, that 
gives power to those who appear to deserve 
it most and are found to execute it best. That 
is the true meaning of the word Aristocracy 
—-government by the best. 

We have seen at all times men of the highest 
rank taking the lead in popular movements, 
and, in return, we see the warmest advocates of 
plebeian interests extremely anxious to put 
forward any aristocratical pretension that they 
may happen to possess. I should like those 
who believe in the early disappearance of this 
old English spirit to hear the manner in which 
one of the most radical members of the present 
cabinet, lately dead, Sir William Molesworth, 
was talked of before me. “ Sir,” said one of 
the interlocutors to the other, “ you forget 
that his family is one of the oldest in Corn¬ 
wall, that he descends from one of the com- 



84 SIR W. MOLESWORTH—SIR R. PEEL. Sect. YI. 


panions of Edward I. in Palestine, and that 
three successive generations of his ancestors 
have declined the peerage.” 

On the other hand, everybody knows with 
what authority, with what general respect, 
Sir Robert Peel, notwithstanding the obscurity 
of his origin, governed the party that may be 
called aristocratic par excellence , till the day 
when he determined to sacrifice some material 
advantages of the Aristocracy to its own 
future interests and to those of his country. 

The true strength of the English Aristocracy 
and nationality abides in many thousands of 
families of Landed Proprietors, and who, in 
virtue of their property, are the magistrates, 
and, to use our French phrase, administrators 
of the country. They do not disdain, as the 
old French nobility did, to accept administra¬ 
tive, legislative, and judicial functions. Far 
from it—they have almost monopolised them, 
and by so doing have maintained themselves 
at the head of all the developments of society. 
Men without names and without fortune often 
arrive at great political employment, some¬ 
times even to the supreme management of 


Sect. VI. STRENGTH OF THE ARISTOCRACY. 


85 


public affairs, just as might happen in repub¬ 
lics or in absolute monarchies. It happens 
sometimes also, but with more difficulty, and 
rarely, that such men obtain consideration in 
a small or even a large town, where they 
may not have acquired property. But as a 
general rule, the higher positions, the Lords- 
Lieutenant, Sheriffs, and Justices of the 
Peace, the Grand Jurors, the Commissioners of 
roads, the Conservators of public edifices—in 
fact, all that in France is done by the salaried 
servants of our variable Government, which 
is seldom to-day what it was yesterday or will 
be to-morrow—all this, I say, is in England 
executed by the class of Country Gentlemen, 
who, while they continue to live at home, 
regulate the finances and administer justice 
in their respective localities, spontaneously, 
gratuitously, and with an admirable degree of 
perfection. 

Independent of the Court and the Cabinet, 
exempt, as far as men living in society 
can be, from personal interests, and safe 
from the intrigues, affronts, and trammels of 
a system of centralization and bureaucracy , 



86 


ENGLISH COUNTRY GENTLEMEN. Sect. VI. 


which are everywhere the head-quarters and 
standing army of democracy, the English 
Country Gentlemen exhibit in their position, 
their habits, and their vigorous and useful 
existence, the only example of a real and in¬ 
fluential aristocracy that Europe possesses. 

All this, I think, is evident; but it is 
perhaps less so how this Gentry has had the 
good fortune to escape the jealousy or the 
hatred of those either above or below them. 
This success is owing to the Gentry’s being, 
like the peerage, and still more than the 
peerage, accessible to all. 

Every man who makes his fortune, be it in 
industry, commerce, the bar, or in the medical 
or any other profession, aspires to become a 
landed proprietor. He becomes so sooner or 
later, and then immediately begins to think, 
like a true Englishman, of founding a family 
and consolidating an estate. He thus becomes 
a member of that great corporation of Gentry 
which guides, governs, and represents the 
country, and which maintains its high station 
by unceasingly recruiting itself with all the 
wealth, the strength, and the abilities which are 


Sect. VI. ENGLISH COUNTRY GENTLEMEN. 


87 


developed from below in the course and pro¬ 
gress of social life. After, at latest, one gene¬ 
ration this new family is received on a perfect 
equality with the most ancient of the country, 
for it is well known that many of the most 
ancient houses of England, that may he traced 
as far back as the Norman Conquest or the 
Crusades, do not belong to the Peerage, which 
has necessarily, properly, and largely recruited 
from the numerous ranks of those who have 
distinguished themselves in more recent legal, 
civil, or military services to the state. No 
exterior distinction shows this difference of 
origin and antiquity between the modern and 
the ancient gentry—no useless title, uselessly 
lavished—not even that indefinable euphony 
of names which, with us, attaches itself to the 
origin of the nobility, which still constitutes 
its only prestige, and which has hitherto de¬ 
fied all the prohibitions and survived all the 
proscriptions of our incessant revolutions. 

If radicalism was synonymous with liberty, if 
it was not, unfortunately, in England as every¬ 
where else, the snare, the obstacle, the reef on 
which liberty runs the risk of being wrecked, 




88 PRINCIPLE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. Sect. VI. 


how could one understand its aversion to an 
order of things so favourable to the main¬ 
tenance of the political rights of a great 
people, so inaccessible to the usurpations of 
either ministers or monarchs ? Here lives, in 
truth, the principle of that legitimate activity, 
that fruitful and intelligent liberty, that the 
English embody in the name of self-govern¬ 
ment. Thanks to it, they may leave to the 
great public powers — the Crown and the 
Parliament—the plenitude of sovereign legis¬ 
lation, and the care of directing all higher 
political interests at home and abroad, with¬ 
out thinking themselves thereby obliged to 
abdicate the management of their own 
interests, or the profession of their own free 
convictions within their own proper circle, 
and without ceasing to keep an active and 
jealous eye on the general march of the 
Government. Thus, moreover, has been 
effected the marvellous alliance which com¬ 
bines in the minds of all Englishmen a pro¬ 
found respect for the rights of legal authority 
with the sentiment of true personal dignity 
and of the highest degree of individual liberty. 


Sect. VI. CONSTITUTION OF ARISTOCRACY. 


89 


The large landed fortunes do not, as some 
fancy, and as is often repeated, prevent 
there being in England, as elsewhere, many 
small proprietors. There are vast numbers of 
them, known as freeholders , and who have in 
consequence the right to vote in parliamentary 
elections, provided they pay a small contribu¬ 
tion, much inferior to that which is required 
of the farmers. Landed property is accessible 
to everybody in England, and, everything 
considered, is, on the whole, cheaper than in 
France. But the English system has a double 
advantage : on one hand the laws of inherit¬ 
ance prevent a ruinous subdivision of the 
soil and an indefinite increase of small pro¬ 
prietors, while on the other the small pro¬ 
prietors are not incited to any political 
opinions antagonistic to those of the great 
proprietors, round whom they, as it were, 
naturally group themselves, generally adopt¬ 
ing their ideas, passions, and quarrels, willing 
and even proud to be their active, intelligent, 
and voluntary clients. Here is then an Aris¬ 
tocracy constituted on the most solid basis, 
that of services rendered to the public, and 


90 


STABILITY OF THE 


Sect. VI. 


of the permanent exercise of an independent, 
and till these days uncontested authority. 
It has preserved all that Aristocracy could 
and ought to preserve, since the invention of 
gunpowder and the maintenance of regular 
armies have deprived it of the exclusive pri¬ 
vilege of fighting for the community. It 
has remained free and powerful. How has it 
escaped the fate of Continental aristocracies, 
the unpopularity, the degradation which have 
become the common lot of the nobility in 
almost all the other nations of Europe ? 
This is what we shall try to explain. 

The English Aristocracy has escaped poli¬ 
tical prostration and royal despotism by the 
honest and courageous exercise of parlia¬ 
mentary government. It has escaped because 
it has understood that other arms than the 
sword and other resources besides the in¬ 
trigues and the rivalry of the court were 
required to resist the encroachments of mo¬ 
narchy. It has saved itself by invoking and 
exerting the powers of right and of reasoning 
—the conflict of thought and speech—while 
at the same time it studied and cultivated 


Sect. VI. ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY EXPLAINED. 91 


with an indefatigable solicitude the general 
interests, commerce, agriculture, manual in¬ 
dustry, and arts, through the medium of the 
individual responsibility of its representatives 
exercised in the free and public discussions of 
parliament. 

Thus jealous of and guarded against royal 
encroachment, it has not been less wise in its 
relations with the people. There it has shown 
equal equity and foresight, and we love to 
see and acknowledge in its long prosperity 
one of the rewards so rarely granted in this 
world to justice and prudence. It renounced 
in good time all the rights, the dues, the 
suits and services, the privileges that were 
necessary and beneficial consequences of the 
feudal system in the middle ages, but which 
had lost that double character in the trans¬ 
formations of modern society. 

When and how was this salutary renuncia¬ 
tion performed ? By what law has the English 
gentleman ceased to be a separate and exclusive 
class, to have privileged jurisdictions, to be 
authorised to require from his inferiors onerous 
and humiliating obligations, and to impose 


92 ENGLAND AND FRANCE CONTRASTED. Sect. VI. 

upon his vassals burdens advantageous only 
to himself? This we don’t know. Certainly 
there is no problem in history more worthy of 
study and of greater interest to the learned 
and the politician. I recommend it to them, 
and I wonder that it has not become before 
this the object of special researches. He who, 
following through the course of ages the rela¬ 
tions existing in England between great pro¬ 
perty and its tenants, comparing them with 
the fatal dissensions of the nobility and the 
agricultural classes on the Continent—he who 
could do such a thing would write one of the 
most beautiful and most useful pages in the 
history of the world. 

But this much is certain, that ever since 
the great revolts of the fourteenth and fif¬ 
teenth centuries, which were personified in 
Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, there has never 
been seen in the history of England any trace 
of the rising of the lower classes against the 
higher. It is equally certain that while the 
French Noblesse , after having sacrificed to the 
monarch its own dignity and independence, 
obstinately maintained that oppressive and 


Sect. VI. ENGLAND AND FRANCE CONTRASTED. 93 

superannuated system which fell to pieces on 
the night of the 4th August, 1789, the English 
nobility—the Gentry —had two centuries before 
released its rural population and delivered 
itself from the yoke of those fatal anachron¬ 
isms. What was the result ? Why, that 
England, having effected her revolution a 
century and a half before us—when the Long 
Parliament raised against the Crown that 
insurrection which led to a temporary re¬ 
public—not only were the first noblemen in 
the land at the head of the parliamentary 
armies,* but the peasantry fought with and 
for their lords. Nowhere was there seen any 
symptom of a popular movement against the 
aristocracy, against its property, or its rights. 
Deprived for a time of its official power by 
the suppression of the House of Peers, the 
English nobility nevertheless maintained its 
ascendency in the hearts of the people. The 
cavaliers retired to their estates, where they 
lived loved and respected by their neighbours, 


* For instance, the Earls of Stamford, Essex, Manchester, 
Warwick, Northumberland, and Bedford. 




94 ENGLAND AND FRANCE CONTRASTED. Sect. VI. 

tenants, and dependents. And why ? Be¬ 
cause not only then, but long before, there 
was in England no such thing as serfs and 
vassals ; no Englishman was the subject or 
the legal inferior of any other Englishman ; 
no field was burdened with oppressive dues; 
no industry was hampered by humiliating 
restrictions. 

Hence has proceeded, in my opinion, the 
immense superiority of the English aristo¬ 
cracy ; here is the legitimate foundation of its 
influence. Let others speak of its splendour, 
its talents, its courage, its eloquence, its poli¬ 
tical genius, and they will say only the truth ; 
hut, as for me, I admire and honour above all 
this aristocracy, for having so much earlier 
and better than the rest of Europe appreciated 
its duties to its inferiors without having been 
driven to do so by the dictates of a despot 
or by an insurrection of the people, and all 
with so little noise or parade, that scarcely 
can we % trace in the history of England the 
footsteps oh such a prodigious and happy 
revolution. 

We had formerly in France a social regime 


Sect. VI. ENGLAND AND FRANCE CONTRASTED. 95 


ill which some men were everything and 
others nothing—a regime by which, to gratify 
the pride of a few, we humiliated the many. 
We thought to remedy this state of things 
by inventing a regime in which no individual 
whatever is of any account, but all are 
equally abased. England alone has created 
and for centuries maintained a social system 
which oppresses and humiliates no one, and 
permits every Englishman to walk erect, and 
to say for himself, as well as the King, Dieu 
et mom clroit 1 

This is the secret of the love that the Eng¬ 
lish people bear to their history. That history 
no doubt calls to mind many crimes, many 
misfortunes, but it records no systematic hu¬ 
miliation, none of those fatal divisions of caste, 
the recollection of which—taken advantage 
of with such blind hatred by some, and with 
such perfidious ability by others—lasts for 
ages, and condemns innocent generations to 
discord, impotence, and slavery. Hence arises 
in Englishmen that true patriotism which 
rests on their respect for their ancestors, 
their veneration for ancient customs, and the 



96 


THE RURAL POPULATION. 


Sect. VI. 


memory of the past, which no one thinks of 
calumniating or repudiating. 

Such is also the reason of the affectionate 
veneration which the rural population enter¬ 
tain for the landed aristocracy. Daily in con¬ 
tact one with another, these two classes live 
in the best intelligence; and this, let it be 
well understood, is the strongest safeguard of 
England against revolutions, and the true 
bulwark of her constitution against the en¬ 
croachments of democracy. So long as the 
agricultural classes in a country are not per¬ 
vaded with the revolutionary spirit, its vic¬ 
tories are hut ephemeral, and have no root 
whatever. The democratic revolution, long 
prepared in France by absolute power, has 
definitely triumphed there only by identi¬ 
fying its cause with that of the rural masses, 
whose rights were annulled, whose burdens 
were excessive, and who felt themselves still 
more wounded in their moral pride than 
even in their material interests by thtf 
obstinate maintenance of a superannuated 
legislation. 

There is not yet in England on this point 


Sect. VI. FIDELITY OF RURAL POPULATION. 97 


any sign of dissension or of serious dissatis¬ 
faction. It is not certain that even now the 
working classes do not ask in their hearts 
whether the Aristocracy be not their natural 
ally against the abuses of industrialism. By 
making the best use of its 'prestige —by re¬ 
nouncing in time divisions and distinctions 
formerly useful and fruitful, but now obsolete, 
in order to concentrate its solicitude and its 
efforts on the more important social questions, 
the English aristocracy (of which many of its 
members have already taken this line) would 
probably acquire the first place in the esteem 
and the confidence of the working masses. 
However that may he, the career is open, and 
the prize will he awarded to the most zealous 
and the most deserving. • 

But, as to the rural classes, no doubt on 
that point as yet exists. Even supposing that 
a revolution should make itself master of the 
towns and put arms in the hands of all the 
workmen of the manufactories, it would meet 
an insurmountable resistance in the robust, 
energetic, and loyal populations of the country. 

' These would follow and fight for their land- 

n 


98 


ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY. 


Sect. YI. 


lords, who not only administer amongst them 
benevolent protection and impartial justice, 
but who also are in command of the militia 
and the yeomanry—a kind of national guard, 
infantry and cavalry—almost exclusively sup¬ 
plied by the agricultural districts. Add to 
this the active participation of the gentry in 
the savings-banks, in the benefit-societies, in 
all the works and associations directed towards 
the welfare, physical and moral, of the culti¬ 
vators of the soil, and one will see that all is 
organized by mutual obligations, that the 
patrons are never likely to he found wanting 
to their clients nor the clients to their 
patrons. 


Sect. VII. 


PRIMOGENITURE. 


99 


SECTION VII. 

ON THE LAW OF ENTAILS. 

But if a precocious equity, a humane and 
paternal influence have acquired for the Eng¬ 
lish aristocracy a true ascendency over the 
rural populations, one must not mistake the 
most effective cause and instrument of its 
power. This instrument is the right of primo¬ 
geniture derived from the liberty of bequeath¬ 
ing, and having for result the indivisibility 
of the landed property of families. This is 
the true palladium of English Aristocracy, 
and consequently of the liberty of English 
society, such as they have existed to this day. 

God forbid that I should identify every¬ 
where political liberty with the right of 
primogeniture, and enchain the future liber¬ 
ties of the Continent to the maintenance or 
the re-establishment of this or that order of 
succession ! But, whether they will or not, 

h 2 


100 


PRIMOGENITURE. 


Sect. VII. 


those who admire and envy English liberty 
must understand the conditions under which 
only that liberty can last. They would, how¬ 
ever, be greatly in the wrong who fancy that 
they see in this institution, such as it exists in 
England, an exclusive guarantee for the nobi¬ 
lity such as were the majorats in France and 
in Spain, and the fidei-commis in Germany. 
Assuredly the great ancient and illustrious 
families of England, those especially which 
compose the peerage, require this condition, 
and take advantage of it. But that is the 
least advantage of this great system. It 
creates the esprit de famille and the solidity 
of landed property far beyond the narrow 
circle of the high nobility and in every class 
of society, for every father of a family, 
whether the creator or inheritor of his pro¬ 
perty, can create an entail without any 
authorisation or intervention on the part of 
the Government. 

Thus it gives effect to the wish so natural 

to all mankind to direct the transmission and 

* 

secure the integrity and duration of property 
—the wish and the right not only of one 


Sect. VII. 


PRIMOGENITURE. 


101 


class, but of the whole nation, at least of all 
that part of the nation which has either inhe¬ 
rited or by its labour and intelligence ac¬ 
quired property. It is thus that it has be¬ 
come not a distinction of caste , but a popular 
and national institution. It. is not a privi¬ 
lege, but a right born of general liberty, and 
common to all classes of society. 


The right of primogeniture is, as every one 
knows, the offspring of the liberty to make a 



respected in truly 


free nations, such as were the Romans, and 
such as are now the English and the Ame¬ 
ricans.* While the French law, making no 
account of the will of the father or the tra- 

* M. de Tocqueville, in liis celebrated work on Democracy 
in America, observes that in the United States the legislation 
of most of the States admits of entails, and gives fulkliberty to 
dispose by will of properties not entailed. Equal division does 
not exist but for successions ah intestat. It is the contrary of 
what is practised in England, where, concerning landed properties, 
the land which has not been disposed of by will goes all to the 
eldest son. Equal division exists for chattels. In the two 
countries the right of making a will is the corrective of the dis¬ 
positions of the law; but in France this corrective is an illusion, 
for the law, as is well known, prohibits entails, and renders 
a will superfluous, leaving to the father but the right to give 
to one of his’children a small advantage purely personal and 
for life. 4 




102 


WILLS. 


Sect. VII. 


ditions of the family, peremptorily imposes 
the equality of share and the indefinite divi¬ 
sion of inheritances, the English law only 
interferes in case of intestacy, and then it 
makes the eldest son the exclusive jwoprietor 
of the landed property; bnt it leaves entire 
liberty to the father of the family, if not 
restricted by settlement or entail, to dispose 
by will of his property as he shall choose. 
Let us add that every Englishman makes a 
will. It is a civil right that he would re¬ 
proach himself for not exercising. To learn 
how popular and natural this system is, we 
must not study the practice of it in the great 
and ancient families, which, inheriting from 
former possessors, feel especially bound to pay 
their debt to the future. Let us take the 
daily and universal example of a monied man, 
whether a successful tradesman or manufac¬ 
turer, who has invested all, or almost all, his 
accumulations in landed property. Such a 
man is entirely the author and master of his 
own fortune, of which he got nothing by 
succession or entail. 

Now what do we every day see him do ? 


Sect. VII. CREATION OF PATRIMONIES. 


103 


His first thought, on becoming a landed pro¬ 
prietor, is to create a future and durable patri¬ 
mony for the family he has founded. He 
wishes, above all, to perpetuate in it the pos¬ 
session of the land which he has acquired, and 
to secure to his posterity the fruits of his in¬ 
dustry and of his talents. There is not in this 
any* aristocratic feeling, in the sense that is 
generally attached to the word. It is that 
natural, domestic, and social feeling which 
has been and still is at the root of all human 
society—the love of durability and an aspira¬ 
tion towards futurity. It is for this that he 
selects his eldest son, if he has one, and 
favours him, not from a motive of personal 
partiality or vanity, but to create a head of a 
family to replace himself, when he shall have 
departed, and to preserve to the paternal 
hearth a patrimonial domain, and both of his 
own foundation. This advantage that he 
gives his eldest son is not to be for his eldest 
son alone. By means of an entail he spreads 
his care over two generations. The modern 
laws which have limited the power of entails 
do not allow him to do more, but this suf- 


104 


CREATION OF PATRIMONIES. Sect. VII. 


fices. He has deposited in the hosom of this 
new family the germs of durability, of in¬ 
crease, of permanence, and of stability; he 
has guarded the future prospects of his family 
from the negligence or prodigality of an indi¬ 
vidual successor; he has provided for the 
integral transmission of property merely ] 3 er- 
sonal, of connections, establishments, ancf en¬ 
terprises of agriculture, of industry, and of 
commerce; he knows, or at least he hopes, 
that his grandson will continue or repeat 
what he himself has done, and this hope is 
seldom disappointed. The power given by 
modern legislation to the usufructuary and, 
when of age, the remainder man, to agree to 
cut off the entail, has as yet impaired in no 
serious degree these traditional customs. We 
have seen, in the highest ranks of the peer¬ 
age, some fathers loaded with debts take ad¬ 
vantage of this mode of cutting off entails, to 
obtain or extort from their sons, at the mo¬ 
ment that these were coming of age, the 
sacrifice of the brilliant fortune which had 
been settled upon them, and thus throw into 
the abyss of their individual prodigality the 


105 


Sect. VII. CREATION OF PATRIMONIES. 

accumulated wealth of many generations ; but 
we see also innumerable instances in which 
new entails are created by the free will and 
provident care of those on whose decease they 
would be likely to expire. 

The frequent expiries and renewings of 
entails under the existing, laws afford the old 
families convenient opportunities of rectifying 
abuses, and of preventing the inconvenience 
likely to ensue from too great an accumulation 
of property in one person. It affords also the 
means of making a provision for younger 
children, which in every generation tends to 
distribute or share the common fund origin¬ 
ally entailed. What astonishes a French¬ 
man in the application of this system is the 
union and harmony of families, quite as great 
in England as it is with us—the absence of 
that jealousy which is excited in France by 
the slightest advantage given to one child in 
preference to another, even within the narrow 
limits assigned to the parents by the civil 
code—a jealousy legitimate enough when we 
consider the exclusively personal and tran¬ 
sitory character of this privilege ; so that the 



106 


CREATION OF PATRIMONIES. Sect. VII. 


parent who exercises it seems to mark an 
unjust degree of affection for one child rather 
than another. 

Even in England it may be doubted 
whether this perfect and universal resignation 
of younger sons to such a state of things will 
last for ever. 

But it now exists and works in general so 
happily and harmoniously, that the new men, 
founders of new families, readily adopt this 
feudal practice of the aristocracy and apply 
it to the occasions and exigencies of modern 
society. In a word, the landed patrimony 
of every English family, whether old or new, 
is regarded and called an estate , that is a 
stability , in which the younger branches take 
a kind of pride, almost rivalling that of the 
senior possessor ; the idea of subdividing it 
appears to them as strange, wild, and unprac¬ 
tical as appears to us that of the division of 
royalty between the sons of Clovis. Thus the 
English are satisfied to correct by the prudent 
and affectionate exercise of the right of entail, 
what would be too absolute and exclusive in 
the unmitigated right of primogeniture. 


Sect. YU. TEE “ MORCELLEMENT” SYSTEM. 107 


I do not here pretend to treat the question 
of the morcellement of landed property by its 
equal division amongst children. I know the 
strength of the principle that the Code Napo¬ 
leon has deposited in the heart of France, and 
which has the advantage of deriving more 
strength from its antagonists than its advo¬ 
cates. Though it imposes on one of the most 
precious and natural liberties of mankind a 
yoke unknown till our days, it has had the 
advantage of being opposed by the enemies 
of modern liberty. It has been questioned 
under the Restoration by statesmen who had 
allowed themselves to be considered the ad¬ 
versaries of liberal ideas and institutions. It 
is questioned to this day by a school which 
indulges daily in the most provoking attacks 
against every manifestation of human inde¬ 
pendence. Such an opposition is with me 
the main recommendation of this principle. 
But it yet remains to it to he discussed and 
tested on the broader ground of liberty, and 
by a sober inquiry whether such an inces¬ 
sant mobility and infinite divisibility of pro¬ 
perty can offer a sufficient guarantee, on the 


108 THE “MORCELLEMENT” SYSTEM. Sect. VII. 


one hand to the esprit de famille and agri¬ 
culture, and on the other, to the durability 
and the dignity of modern society.* It is 
still to be proved whether the indefinite sub¬ 
division of inheritances, and the dissolving 
elfect of equal distribution, are not the most 
efficacious instruments ever invented by des¬ 
potism to crush all resistance, and pulverize 
all the collective or individual powers of a 
people.f 

* It is impossible not to mention here the remarkable exami¬ 
nation of this question by M. Plaz, Chief Engineer of Mines, 
in his important work, ‘ Les Ouvriers Europeens,’ 1855, pp. 
223, 251, 286. He proves that the law which gives to each heir, 
in opposition to the will of the father of the family and of the 
co-heirs, the right of parcelling out the inheritance, is in fact the 
greatest obstacle in the way of that creation of small properties 
that the Code Napoleon seemed to aim at. As to the agricultural 
point of view, one must read and re-read the book of M. Leonce 
de Lavergne on the Economie Eurale of England, in which facts 
speak with such convincing eloquence. 

t Hear what the great master in the art of despotism advises 
one of his pupils, King Joseph :—“ Establish our Code Civil at 
Naples : it will destroy all that does not attach itself to you in a 

few years. That is the great advantage of the Code Civil . 

You must establish the Code Civil amoftgst you. It will con¬ 
solidate your power ; for by it all that is not entailed soon falls 
to pieces. This is the consideration that makes me preach up 
the Code Civil, and led me to establish it in France.”— Napoleon 
to Joseph , 5th June , 1804. 




Sect. VII. CONTRARY PRINCIPLE IN ENGLAND. 109 


But at all events, one thing is certain, that 
the political liberty of England rests on the 
contrary principle. The stability of landed 
property, guaranteed by the right of bequeath¬ 
ing and entailing, is the palladium of English 
society—the double bulwark which has de¬ 
fended it up to this hour against the usurpa¬ 
tions of the monarch and the irruption of 
demagogues. Thanks to this institution, self- 
respect is blended with that which is felt for 
one’s ancestors under shelter of the paternal 
roof: the spirit of liberty finds in every an¬ 
cient mansion a stronghold of durability and 
resistance to change. It has rooted itself 
in a soil which has not yet lost, as it has 
done elsewhere, its distinguishing title of a 
reality , and become what the English call a 
chattel—a mere personal and ephemeral pos¬ 
session, which may be cut and carved till its 
fragments become a kind of currency, a sort 
of clumsy money, which by-and-by, with the 
help of notaries and schedules, may circulate 
like bills of exchange or checks payable to the 
bearer. 



110 


THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. Sect. VII, 


Et majores vestros et posteros cogitate! This 
is what every Englishman ought to read on 
the front of his ancestral home, to remind 
him of the proud independence his fathers 
enjoyed there, and for which he is in his turn 
accountable to his posterity. Thus it is that 
under the paternal roof—under the shade of 
the trees planted by their ancestors, grow up 
and pass the calm and inflexible lives of 
those noble and pure races, which are per¬ 
sonified in the Country Gentleman —the civis 
agricola of England! 

There it is that he learns that quiet pride 
—that independence respectful to others and 
satisfied in itself—that attitude neither rude 
nor servile—of all of which he is a pattern. 
It is there that are developed the tranquil- 
lising sensations of comfort, competence, and 
stability, which are the foundation of the 
internal quiet and prosperity of states—the 
happiness of feeling himself in his proper 
place and in his proper rank, because that 
rank and place are determined and guaran¬ 
teed, as far as the uncertainty of human 



Sect. VII. THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. 


Ill 


affairs permits, against the risks—the per¬ 
petual proximity to ruin, which, under a 
despotism or under a democracy, threatens 

every class of society. 

« 

These happy dispositions of private and 
rural life reflect themselves on political life, 
and have almost always inspired the public 
men of England—those of the highest as well 
as of the inferior ranks—with an equally 
strong feeling of public duty and of personal 
dignity. 

We are told that Napoleon, soon after his 
arrival at St. Helena, while discussing the 
position of the great Captain who had con¬ 
quered him and the career which such a vic¬ 
tory might open to his ambition, allowed 
these words to escape him :—“ Now we shall 
see what Wellington will do l ” Napoleon, 
ruminating on his own headlong, adventurous 
career—on the fortunes he had made and de¬ 
stroyed—on his habit of gambling with the 
rights and consciences of others as he did 
with his own, was unable to understand that 
an Englishman, even when arrived at the 






112 


THE COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. Sect. YII. 


summit of glory and popularity, could have 
been satisfied with quietly remaining in his 
proper place, with doing his duty in parlia¬ 
ment and to his country, taking in the debates 
of the former that share which was expected 
from his age, services, and wisdom, and find¬ 
ing in the cultivation and improvement of 
a patrimonial property, such as Wellington 
founded at Strathfieldsaye, the intei-sessional 
occupation and solace of his old age, and the 
future dignity and security of his successors ! 

Nor should we leave out of our calculation 
the moral effects of such a life on the gene¬ 
rous faculties of the mind, in the formation of 
great characters, and in the training of men’s 
hearts to a devotion to one’s country worthy 
of history. When circumstances shall require 
it—when the hour of the great struggle shall 
have struck, it is from the bosom of the rural 
communities of the Anglo-Saxon race that 
will emerge the chiefs predestinated to autho¬ 
rity, to responsibility, and to glory. The 
two men who hear the purest names in the 
history of modern liberty, who are the types 
pai excellence of the patriot, the true liberal, 


Sect. YII. IMPORTANCE OF ENTAILS. 


113 


the honest man—Hampden and Washington, 
were English country gentlemen * 

We may come to the conclusion, for the 
instruction of other nations, that the liberty 
of entailing and settling property is at once 
the consequence and the guarantee of general 
liberty. This is perfectly well understood 
by those writers amongst us who, in the 
spirit of Napoleon’s advice to Joseph, are 
advocates at once of absolute monarchy and 
the Code Civil. Nor should it ever be forgot¬ 
ten by their antagonists who still remain 
faithful to liberal principles and hopes, that the 
right of primogeniture—that is to say, a check 
on the indefinite subdivision of the land by a 
power of bequest—is repugnant only to des¬ 
potism. Nor is it a right inherent in, or 
confined to, an aristocracy. It would adapt 


* Thanks to M. Guizot and to his son-in-law, M. de Witt, 
we are in France sufficiently acquainted with the life and corre¬ 
spondence of Washington not to be surprised to see him recorded 
amongst the glorious names of the England that he defeated : 
he was certainly a thorough-bred Englishman, and just as much 
an aristocrat as any lord of his time or of ours. We have 
amongst us plenty of dealers in paradox, hut the most audacious 
of them would not venture to pass Washington on us for a 
democrat. 


I 



114 


IMPORTANCE OF ENTAILS. Sect. YII. 


itself perfectly to a wise and well-organised 
democracy. It would give it strength and 
stability by conciliating it with the best in¬ 
stincts of our nature, as also with the best 
interests of property itself. 

When the English determined to seal the 
subjection of Ireland, they decreed by a law of 
1701, that the landed 'properties of all deceased 
Papists should he divided equally amongst their 
sons , unless the eldest became a Protestant, in 
which case be would become the exclusive 
heir at the death of bis father. (2 Anne, 
chap, vi., sect. 10 and 12.) 

When they began to repent of their long 
iniquity towards their victim, the first act of 
the gradual emancipation of the Catholics 
was to abrogate that law in 1778, and thus 
to re-establish for the Irish Papists the dig¬ 
nity and independence of property. 

Such then is, and such ought to be, the 
ruling principle, not, we repeat, of the aris¬ 
tocracy only, hut of all landed property. As 
long as this legislation shall remain, as long 
as it shall suffer no other change than may 
he necessary to correct abuses, and thus ren- 


Sect. VII. IMPORTANCE OF ENTAILS. 


115 


der it more perfect, we may be re-assured as 
to the fate of England. The Revolutionary 
storm will be no serious danger to her till 
that fatal day, if ever it should come, 
when her public opinion shall declare itself 
against entails and primogeniture. Then and 
then only England will have taken the first 
step on that steep descent which precipitates 
nations, through the shocks of revolutions, 
into the abyss of despotism. 

There has been as yet but one precursive 
symptom of it—the proposition made last 
year to the House of Commons, by Mr. Locke 
King, to obtain an inquiry into the law of 
successions. This proposition, rejected by a 
considerable majority, does not seem to have 
found an echo, nor to have left any serious 
trace. But it is a presage that foreseeing 
men and sincere friends of liberty in Eng¬ 
land will do well not to lose sight of, for 
it is through that sap that the enemies will 
enter the place. 


116 


PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. Sect. VIII. 


SECTION VIII. 

PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 

As to parliamentary reform, that of twenty- 
five years ago, as well as that one which 
will probably be attempted as soon as peace 
shall he made, it will not essentially alter 
the present state of things in England. The 
greatest inconvenience of the reform of 1830 
is that of rendering access to the House of 
Commons more difficult to some young men of 
merit and of expectations who used formerly 
to get in (like Burke, Fox, and Pitt) by the 
favour of an independent proprietor of a 
borough, but who now-a-days can attain that 
object only by devoting themselves to the 
interests of the Government or to the passions 
of the Opposition, or by striving to acquire at 
any price a degree of notoriety seldom com¬ 
patible with the reserve, the dignity, and the 
real independence of a public man. 


Sect. VIII. PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. 117 

It lias been thence inferred that the level of 
the House of Commons has lowered since that 
reform. It may be so. It was nevertheless 
right and necessary to get rid of the scandal 
of those rotten boroughs, and to re-establish a 
just proportion between the representation of 
the old agricultural and the new industrial 
interest in Parliament. This reform has been 
but a consequence of the increase of labour 
and wealth which manifested itself in the 
towns and the manufacturing districts of the 
country. In a moral and political point of 
view, we may deplore that increase ; but from 
the moment that it became an acknowledged 
fact, policy required that it should be dealt 
with. 

It would have been the height of injustice 
and imprudence to refuse to the populations 
and the monied interests created by the de¬ 
velopment of mechanical labour, and espe¬ 
cially in the coal districts, their proportionate 
share in the national representation. This 
share has not been exceeded, for at the same 
time that these new elements were admitted 
to the enjoyment of the electoral franchise, 


118 


PARLIAMENTARY REFORM. Sect. VIII. 


the old and vital elements of public power 
were reinforced by increasing the number of 
farmer-electors, and above all of the members 
for counties—that is to say, of the landed pro¬ 
perty. This latter interest has therefore still 
the preponderance in a system from which for¬ 
tunately no portion of the national strength, 
no class of interests, of rights, or of wants are 
excluded. Let us observe, moreover, that it 
has required fifty years of efforts to obtain 
this result.'* The small number of electoral 
boroughs may still be reduced, but it will not 
be so without giving a proportionate equiva¬ 
lent to the agricultural representation; and 
as long as this proportion is preserved, nothing 
will have been fundamentally changed or 
shaken ; but it would be a different case if the 
democracy should succeed in altering the pre¬ 
sent proportion by taking population for the 
only basis—in delivering over a preponderance 
of representation to the unsettled, over-ex¬ 
citable, and demoralised populations of the 


* The second Pitt made his first speech on electoral reform in 
1782, and the reform was only voted in Lord Grey’s ministry, on 
the proposition of Lord John Russell, in 1831 ! 



Sect. VIII. CONSTITUTION OF PARLIAMENT. 119 


towns—or, still worse, in assuming as tlie only 
. or even main foundation of national representa¬ 
tion the delusions and extravagances of uni¬ 
versal suffrage. Then indeed there would be 
a sure and early end of the Parliament and 
of the existing England, but let us hope that 
for this we have long to wait. We may con¬ 
clude that, as at present constituted, Parlia¬ 
ment still is what it was—the great council 
of a great people, where no doubt every pas¬ 
sion and every prejudice have the right of 
sitting and voting, but where the undeniable 
danger they present is met by the remedial 
opposition and counterbalance of all the 
strength, the intelligence, and independences 
of the wise and manly race that compose the 
majority. Up to this time, all the real wants 
and even wishes of the country have been 
freely represented; and all its serious interests 
wisely ponderated, reconciled, and secured. 
No other form of government has ever given 
to man more opportunities of accomplish¬ 
ing all that is just and reasonable, or more 
facilities for avoiding error and for correct¬ 
ing it. 


120 


POLICY OF PRESERVING IT. Sect. VIII. 


What more is there to he desired ? To pre¬ 
serve this admirable instrument from either 
rust or self-derangement is the simple dictate 
of wisdom,—to attempt to break or trans¬ 
form it would he the height of ingratitude 
and folly. 

But let us leave for a moment these specu¬ 
lations as to the future, to cast a look on the 
spectacle of the present life of the Palace of 
Westminster. 



r 


Sect. IX. PARLIAMENT. 121 


SECTION IX. 

THE PARLIAMENT. 

I should think meanly, I admit, of the heart 
and judgment of the man who could ap¬ 
proach without emotion that palace of the 
English Parliament—that temple of history 
and eloquence, of law and liberty. I cannot 
tread its floor without a feeling of reverence. 
It is more sacred a thousand times than that 
of the Pnyx at Athens or of the Forum at 
.Rome; for it has been for a thousand years 
the political and legislative sanctuary of a 
Christian people, and the cradle of the liber¬ 
ties of the modern world. 

There for many centuries the rights and 
dignity of Man have victoriously struggled 
against the absolute power and the omnipo¬ 
tence of One. There has been knocked to 
pieces the humiliating theory of an Autocracy. 
There was achieved the triumph of that re- 


122 


PAELIAMENT. 


Sect. IX. 


gulated and disciplined liberty which implies 
and maintains a due respect for necessary 
authority, and which is so well expressed by 
the English phrase the liberty of the subject . 
There have been tried, in our days, the most 
noble causes that the human voice has ever 
been called upon to defend—the cause of 
liberty and humanity against the Revolution, 
pleaded and gained by the genius of Burke 
and Pitt,—the cause of the poor negro slave 
against the cruel egotism of colonial industry, 
pleaded and gained by the intrepid and per¬ 
severing virtue of Wilberforce,—the cause 
of the Irish and English Catholics against 
three centuries of prejudices and persecution, 
pleaded and gained by the burning eloquence 
of O’Connell and Sliiel; lastly, the cause of 
the workman and the poor against the blind¬ 
ness of the great landed interest, pleaded and 
gained by the manly good sense of Peel. 

There at least human speech will not be 
accused of sterility or impotence. There, 
no doubt, as everywhere else, men have 
been occasionally carried away by strange 
delusions and fatal violence; and there, no 




Sect. IX. 


ARCHITECTURE. 


123 


doubt, error and untruth have too often 
had, and still, even now, have a most mis¬ 
chievous influence. The truth has never 
long remained unvindicated. Justice is, if 
not always acted upon, at least always lis¬ 
tened to; and right has generally triumphed 
over strength by the arms of eloquence and 
of reason. 

The edifice answers to the majesty of its 
destination. It is certainly the most mag¬ 
nificent product of the renaissance of archi¬ 
tecture in the nineteenth century. One 
might wish for a less florid style and a less 
monotonous profusion of decoration in this 
splendid edifice. One regrets that the archi¬ 
tect was not inspired by the noble simplicity 
of Westminster Abbey rather than its too 
immediate neighbour, Henry YII.’s Chapel, or 
the flamboyant style of the old cloister of the 
canons of St. Stephen. He has done well to 
preserve the latter in the centre of his modem 
work, but he might have dispensed with mak¬ 
ing it the type and the dominant style of the 
regenerated palace ; in spite, however, of these 
overwrought details, the ensemble is incom- 


124 


THE INTERIOR. 


Sect. IX. 


parable. That enormous mass of perforated 
tracery—that forest of pinnacles, battlements, 
and buttresses—that profusion of sculpture 
outside and inside—those colossal towers-— 
those innumerable turrets—the facade on the 
Thames with the two terraces, washed by the 
great river, which seems to bring to the feet 
of the national legislature the tribute of the 
maritime and commercial greatness of Eng¬ 
land all this does well deserve the expres¬ 
sive cry of admiration which, even before it 
was terminated, it elicited from the Emperor 
Nicholas, u But this is a dream in stone /” * 

T ou enter, and you feel almost crushed by 
the immensity of the old Westminster Hall , 
which, with its massive timber roof, sup- 
poited on hammer-beams carved in the figure 
of angels, forms, as it were, the vestibule of 


Sir Charles Barry, the author of the plan selected by com¬ 
petition in 1835, will probably have the honour to finish it, for 
there only remain the two principal towers to terminate. He 
has, however, availed himself of the help, for the ornamental 
part, of the talent of the Catholic architect, Pugin, whose career 
was interrupted by a premature death, but not before he had 
arrived at the first place in his art, by the forty Catholic churches 
raised by his means or from his designs on the emancipated soil 
of England. 



Sect. IX. 


THE INTERIOR. 


125 


the whole palace. This hall is supposed to 
be the largest in Europe, and the boldest in 
the construction of its roof, which rests only 
on the lateral walls. It is there that was 
celebrated, up to 1820, the feudal banquet 
which terminates the ceremony of the Coro¬ 
nation of the kings of England, during which 
banquet a Champion armed cap a pie , ac¬ 
companied by the Master of the Horse and 
the Earl Marshal, used to enter on horse¬ 
back and throw down his gauntlet to who¬ 
ever should have the temerity to contest the 
king’s right to the crown which he had 
just received on the tomb of Edward the 
Confessor. 

There also have been tried all the great 
political causes which give such a special 
character to English history, from that of 
King Charles I. to that of Queen Caroline in 
1820 ; and above all, it is there that the case 
of Warren Hastings absorbed for fifteen years 
all the marvellous eloquence of Burke, Pitt, 
Fox, and Sheridan. Such a hall is worthy 
of being the propylceum of parliamentary 
grandeur. 


126 


THE INTERIOR. 


Sect.IX. 


Ascending a flight of steps that lead ont of 
the hall to the two Houses, we see on either 
hand the statues of the statesmen, magistrates, 
ministers, and other eminent persons who 
have done the greatest honour to the English 
name. In going through the principal door 
you pass between Falkland and Hampden, 
the two heroes of the great civil war—the 
honest, conciliatory, and disinterested Royal¬ 
ist the intrepid, modest, and chivalrous Par¬ 
liamentarian reconciled in death, and united 
in glory by the common admiration of a 
grateful posterity. Elsewhere and every¬ 
where some fresco paintings (which it must 
be confessed might be better), re 23 resenting 
subjects exclusively taken from history, or 
national poetry, instead ol the mythological 
and stupid allegories which preside over the 
legislative deliberations of the Luxembourg 
and the Palais Bourbon. 

Nothing can be more touching, nothing 
more appropriate to their destination than the 
two chambers where the Houses sit, which 
are opposite to each other, at the extremities 
of a cruciform corridor, the immense height 



Sect. IX. 


HOUSE OF LORDS. 


127 


of which excites astonishment. The House 
of Lords is a splendid object. In point of 
art and taste it cannot he said to be irre¬ 
proachable, but it surpasses in magnificence 
and beauty all the analogous edifices in 
Europe. 

The celebrated tapestries which repre¬ 
sented the defeat of the Spanish Armada by 
the fleet of Queen Elizabeth, and which were 
destroyed by fire in 1835, have been replaced 
by windows of painted glass representing the 
kings and queens of England. Between the 
windows are the statues of the barons who 
imposed Magna Charta on King John in 
1215 : clad in their coats of mail, and leaning 
on their swords and their armorial shields, 
they seem to cast a look, at once austere and 
fraternal, on their descendants seated below 
them, and to whom they have transmitted the 
inestimable inheritance of liberty and honour. 
Heraldry is everywhere introduced to explain 
and illustrate history. The coats of arms of 
the great Justiciaries, ever since the Norman 
conquest, with their names and the date of their 
installation, decorate with perfect propriety 


128 


HOUSE OF LORDS. 


Sect. IX. 


the place where has always sat the highest 
and ultimate jurisdiction of the country. 

The Lord Chancellors, who have been at 
all times presidents of the House of Peers, 
have also their history recorded in their 
armorial escutcheons. The name of Thomas 
a Becket figures there, with those of so many 
bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, who, like 
him, have occupied that illustrious position. 
The force of tradition, history, and true patriot¬ 
ism has everywhere overcome the sectarian or 
party spirit. In no place has Protestantism 
impressed its seal on this monument; no¬ 
where is there seen the solution of the con¬ 
tinuity which has separated by the Reforma¬ 
tion the English of the sixteenth century 
from their glorious and invincible ancestors. 
Everywhere, on the contrary, the forms and 
memorials of Catholic art triumph; and one 
might reproach to the ensemble of the decora¬ 
tions trusted to the prodigious talent of the 
Catholic Pugin, too much affectation of an 
ecclesiastical character, and, for a legislative 
building, too much the appearance of a ca¬ 
thedral. 


Sect. IX. 


HOUSE OF COMMONS. 


129 


The throne where the Queen comes to open 
and close the annual sessions of parliament— 
this throne, with its dais, its candelabra, 
its steps of the richest and most liturgic style, 
appears a real altar. 

Never have royalty, liberty, and history 
had a more splendid sanctuary.* 

The effect produced by the House of Com¬ 
mons, more simple and more austere, would 
have been no less grand if it had not been 
indispensable to sacrifice some of its original 
design to the exigences of acoustics. But 
there also the historical and traditional cha¬ 
racter is the basis of the decorations. 

The representatives of the people delibe¬ 
rate there, surrounded by the insignia of 
towns, provinces, kings, and queens, whose 
authority, interests, and grandeur have, after 
so many centuries of conflict, fused them- 


* By a strange and mournful coincidence, a few steps from this 
room where English roj^alty appears in all its historical pomp, 
which it has alone preserved amongst all the nations of the 
West, is kept in a press in the library of the Lords, engrossed 
on parchment, the sentence of death pronounced against King 
Charles I., with the signatures and armorial seals of Cromwell, 
Ludlow, and all the other regicides. 


K 



130 THE MEMBERS. Sect. IX. 

selves into this great body, which has for 
so long boasted itself as being the first as¬ 
sembly of gentlemen in Europe. And there, 
as everywhere, on the floor as on the ceiling, 
under their feet and over their heads, the 
faithful Commons read the proud motto at¬ 
tached by Eichard Cceur de Lion to his crown, 
and which sums up so well the history, the 
greatness, and the strength of England — 
Dieu et mon droit. 

It is surrounded by all this magnificence 
of art and history that sits the English Par¬ 
liament, deliberating with a simplicity, an 
ease, and a tranquillity, which are the pledge 
of strong and serious institutions. Nothing 
is affected—nothing theatrical. A few men 
in frocks and overcoats, with their hats on 
their heads, are busying themselves with the 
interests of the greatest empire of the uni¬ 
verse, and with a salutary slowness make 
those laws which are to rule the destinies 
of two hundred millions of men dispersed in 
the five parts of the world. 

They speak as they sit —sans faqon —as 
impulse, or convenience, or chance directs. 



Sect. IX. 


LONG SPEECHES. 


131 


This admirable simplicity is that which 
strikes one most in the discussions at West¬ 
minster. Every one shows himself just as he 
is, and stranger still, every one takes easily 
and at once the place that seems naturally to 
belong to him. Every one fills the part for 
which he feels himself best adapted, and 
for which the opinion of the House acknow¬ 
ledges his fitness. 

There you see, on both sides of the House, 
the minister and the politician, properly so 
called—the man of business, conversant with 
financial and official details—the lawyer—the 
manufacturer, and the party leaders who 
on either side represent half the public 
opinion of England. In one man you will 
recognise the forlorn hope of some individual 
crotchet. From another you will have to 
undergo the tedium of elaborately prepared 
and dully delivered orations. In the intervals 
will arise a debater , who recalls the discussion to 
its proper object, replies to or confirms those 
who have preceded him, and conducts the 
debate to its logical conclusion. There is not, 
as in France, a prepared list of speakers : every 

k 2 




132 


TOLERANCE OF BORES. 


Sect. IX. 


one speaks when he thinks proper, and this 
is a right that no one contests. 

Ministers are too often subjected to a system 
of interrogatories, and too often of questions 
indiscreet and inopportune, which deserve and 
receive only evasive or derisive answers. The 
speeches are generally too long for our taste, 
and this is the great fault of their style of 
debate. But even this fault is the excess 
of qualities in which our assemblies are wholly 
deficient—-respect for individual rights and 
tolerance of adverse opinions. 

Sometimes one escapes by flight from too 
long a trial of his patience, and a clearance is 
soon observed round the unlucky bore , who 
abuses his privilege, especially if lie forgets 
the exigencies of the prandial appetite or fails 
to observe the drowsiness of his auditors. But 
in general the members bear weariness as well 
as contradiction with admirable jiatience. It 
is not their habit to interrupt a speaker 
by murmurs, exclamations, or protestations 
against the opinions he may utter. They are 
aware that he got up to speak his own senti¬ 
ments, and not theirs—to bring forward his 



Sect. IX. 


A HEARING FOR ALL. 


133 


own ideas, and not those of his adversaries. 
These, therefore, wait patiently till their turn 
comes to answer him. The answer may be 
as sharp or as violent as they choose, but at 
least every one will have had an opportunity 
of expressing his thoughts without having 
had to struggle against the clamours and 
bowlings of those who fancy that an opinion 
stifled and silenced by noise and tumult, is 
an opinion refuted and obliterated. 

I have heard in England not only the great 
speakers whose talent might give them a 
special authority, but even those of the third 
or fourth order, maintain questions the most 
unpopular, nay odious, to the great majority, 
in a House, if not attentive, at least respect¬ 
fully silent. 

It is worthy of remark that the English 
Parliament—the arena in which one might 
expect hereditary rank and political eloquence 
to be all powerful—is by no means exten¬ 
sively or abusively influenced either by birth, 
which is the nightmare of the revolutionists, 
nor by eloquence, which is the bugbear of 
despotism. 




134 


BUSINESS MEN PREFERRED. 


Sect. IX. 


History shows that from Walpole to Peel 
the greatest parts have been performed by 
men whose birth was inferior to that of the 
majority of their hearers and followers, and 
who would not have belonged to what is 
called the Noblesse on the Continent. And as 
to the abuse of the powers of speech, this 
native home of political eloquence is of all 
the countries in the world the one where 
speech , when it is but speech, has the least 
power. The vox et prceterea nihil has here no 
chance of success. A man who is but a fine 
speaker is soon put in his proper place, and 
that place a very low one. The man of re¬ 
spectability or the man of business, who per¬ 
haps hesitates, stammers, or mumbles, but who 
speaks the language of conviction or of expe¬ 
rience, is always preferred to him. We know 
that the general spirit of order and discipline 
that prevails in England has always imposed 
on the Government party, as well as on the 
Opposition, the necessity of an avowed chief, 
or as they say a leader , in each of the houses. 
His authority is often submitted to with 


Sect. IX. 


TRUE ORATORS. 


135 


some individual reluctances, but it is never¬ 
theless submitted to with docility as long as 
it lasts. We have seen the Ministerial party, 
and what is stranger still, the Opposition, 
led by men who were very far from being 
eloquent. 

Neither Lord Castlereagh nor Lord George 
Bentinck were what can be called orators. 
Sir Robert Peel was not much of one—the 
Duke of Wellington not at all; and I do 
not think that Lord Palmerston has been so 
more than once in his life. 

Their true orators often rise to eloquence, 
without aiming at it. They reach it insen¬ 
sibly, through the technical embarrassments 
of figures and details; but having sur¬ 
mounted these preliminary impediments, they 
attain and preserve a level of simplicity and 
majesty infinitely attractive and impressive. 
When some one endued with this talent ap¬ 
pears, all England feels and recognises the 
power of human speech—the supreme type 
of beauty—the irresistible weapon of truth ; 
and she gladly inscribes the new comer in 


136 


THE PRESS—RADICALISM. 


Sect. IX. 


tlie first rank of her glories. She salutes an 
orator !—a title which the English do not 
prostitute as we do to every man who speaks 
in our parliamentary assemblies. 

But parliamentary eloquence, or what we in 
France call the Tribune , has found a formid¬ 
able rival in the Press. 

One of the chiefs of the new Radical school 
has pretended to show that the present deve- 
lopement of the periodical press would be a 
sufficient substitute for political assemblies, 
and that the English parliament is nothing 
but a noisy, troublesome, and superfluous 
piece of machinery. In England, where 
everything is said boldly and without dis¬ 
guise, this doctrine is already avowed, and 
seems the precursor of future defections from 
the old constitutional principle. Radicalism, 
which hates all political guarantees, because 
every guarantee is an obstacle to its progress, 
has an instinctive desire to get rid of the 
parliament, which, while it opposes an equal 
barrier against anarchy from clubs and des¬ 
potism from barracks, is also the bulwark of 


Sect. IX. 


RADICALISM. 


137 


order and legitimate authority, as well as of 
conscience and individual liberty.* 

Radicalism well knows, that by a sort of 
beneficent fascination, which exercised itself 
on Mirabeau as on M. Berryer, Conservative 
principles have in general ended in rallying 
the great orators. 

Experience has proved in France, as in 
England, that the legislative majorities re¬ 
sulting from free debate, and guarded from 
exterior violence, have never failed to decide 
in favour of the old principles of society 
against all utopists and levellers. The same 


* In France at present the most extreme opinions profess a 
common horror of Parliamentary government. We read in the 
Presse of the 28th of December, 1855, what follows :— 

“No question can ever be decided by votes : two to one or 
eleven to ten have never proved in any assembly, in any aca¬ 
demy, or in any conference or congress, anything except the 
want of decisive truth—the absence of demonstrated certainty.” 

And again :—“ With the constitutional system which requires 
deliberative assemblies where all must end in questions decided 
by votes between majority and minority, that might be an in¬ 
vincible difficulty ; but it would disappear in a rational regime , 
which requires hut newspapers .” 

The Univers of the day after reproduces with solemnity part 
of these axioms, and adds on its own account, “ Nothing can 
be more true,” &c. 

Let us hope that the absurdity of the system will at last 
become visible to all eyes. 



138 


IS PARLIAMENT IN DANGER ? Sect. IX. 


experience proves, on the other hand, that 
the Radical and fanatic press, implacable 
against restricted or moderate authority, 
knows how to become as supple and submis¬ 
sive as absolute power can desire. The old 
and sincere friends of liberty will neverthe¬ 
less remain faithful to the axiom which con¬ 
siders the reciprocal action of the press on 
the tribune, and of the tribune on the press, 
as the fundamental condition of the govern¬ 
ment of free countries. 

Will a day ever come when a social disso¬ 
lution, created by a practical democracy, and 
fomented by the temerities of the press, will 
also swallow up the parliament of England? 
Shall we see there also a mob of savages, led 
by actors and mountebanks, invade these 
splendid seats to violate at once the majesty 
of this sanctuary and the liberty which it 
represents ? Or will another Cromwell arise 
to order a picket of soldiers to turn out of 
doors those mutinous babblers ? It may be 
so; hut not yet. None of our contempora¬ 
ries are destined for such a triumph or such 
a shame. 


Sect. X. 


PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 


139 


SECTION X. 

THE SCHOOLS AND THE UNIVERSITIES. 

But there is in England a spectacle still 
greater than that of her parliament, as it is 
a surer guarantee for the old English society 
than even the representative government. 
We mean the establishments for public in¬ 
struction. Too much has been said of par¬ 
liamentary life—not enough of those training- 
schools of public men which are the feeders 
and supports of the former. We have bor¬ 
rowed from England a likeness more or less 
faithful of its political institutions ; but it has 
not been given to any modern nations to 
furnish any imitation, however poor, of her 
Schools and Universities. 

It is known that under the modest name of 
schools , three or four large establishments, 
amongst which Eton * and Harrow j* occupy 

* Founded by King Henry VI. in 1441. 
t Founded by John Lyon in 1585. 




140 


ETON AND HARROW. 


Sect. N. 


the first place, receive, almost without excep¬ 
tion, the children of all the more affluent 
families of the country, and give them an 
education at once classical and manly, under 
the direction of a few eminent members of 
the Anglican clergy. They differ essentially 
from the analogous institutions of France by 
two characters—their antiquity and their 
situation in the country. Identified, we may 
say, their date with the history of the 
nation, the first instruction they afford to their 
pupils is the memory of the great men who 
have preceded them on these school forms 
that they quitted to occupy those higher 
benches at Westminster, where they presided 
over the destinies of the greatest empire 
under the sun. 

A collection of busts and of portraits pre¬ 
sents to the young inhabitants of the place 
the features of those of their predecessors 
whose names have adorned the annals of 
England, or who still perhaps occupy the 
first place in the attention of their contempo¬ 
raries. Most of these are represented young, 
such as they were when the first rays of 



Sect. X. 


ETON AND HARROW. 


141 


glory illumined their brows, or when their 
new-born renown created a wish for a memo¬ 
rial of their former residence : this juvenile 
appearance—this quails eram —seems to be an¬ 
other link between them and their successors. 

The having placed at a salutary distance 
from the metropolis or the neighbourhood of 
large towns these great centres of education, 
has been an all-important advantage. The 
love of the English for rural life is well 
known, as well as the beneficial influence 
that it exerts over them. Nothing then can 
be more natural than their having placed 
the centres of their national education in the 
country; nor can anything tend more use¬ 
fully to the developement both of the moral 
and physical qualities of youth. It is difficult 
to conceive a spot better suited to exercise 
a happy influence and lasting impression on 
the elite of the sons of a great nation than 
Eton, for example. 

The lodgings of the masters and pupils 
form a large and handsome edifice, built in 
the semi-Gothic style, which suits so well the 
manners and the ideas of the country. The 


142 


ETON. 


Sect. X. 


chapel, worthy of being a cathedral, is one of 
the finest specimens of the English architec¬ 
ture of the fifteenth century. 

Opposite to it, and on the other side of the 
Thames, is Windsor Castle, the home of roy¬ 
alty, with its huge Round Tower, built by 
William the Conqueror, and its St. George’s 
Chapel, all covered with the arms of the 
Knights of the Garter since Edward III. 

Around the school are wide meadows, 
bounded by the windings of the Thames, 
which form as it were a park of lawns and 
groves, as far as the eye can see. But the 
pupils are not confined to their play-ground; 
they pour out at all hours into the surround¬ 
ing country, and in the neighbouring towns 
and villages; except during the school hours, 
they do pretty much what they like, and very 
rarely abuse this liberty, which appears so 
strange to us. Unwatched by any special 
superintendent, with no restrictions but those 
imposed by certain traditional customs and 
by that self-respect which every Englishman 
is so early taught, they thus begin their 
apprenticeship of public life and of self- 


Sect. X. 


ETON. 


143 


government, as their fathers and ours did in 
the schools of the middle ages.* 

The number of studious and successful 
scholars is not greater probably than in our 
Lycees — perhaps less; but the study of an¬ 
cient languages is with some carried very 
high, and is popular with all. Moreover, in 
the mass of these children, life, health, and 


* M. Charles Lenormant, in his work on VEnseignement des 
Langues Classiques, has perfectly explained the change which 
took place in the 16th century in the discipline of our public 
schools, and which received its definitive character from Napo¬ 
leon I. What happened to the political institutions happened 
also to them. The legitimate fear inspired by the Reformation 
excited everywhere compression and restriction, and substi¬ 
tuted a terrified, and often powerless, authority, for confidence, 
independence, and spontaneity. No price could be too great 
for the maintenance of the Catholic faith and unity ; but 
we must regret that England, in losing these treasures, should 
have been the only country able to keep the Catholic institutions 
founded by the middle ages. “ It is difficult,” says M. Lorain, 
ex-Rector of one of our colleges, in a work that we shall mention 
hereafter, “ to have lived long in our colleges without thinking 
that the minds which are so compressed for ten years, and that 
at an age when nature requires expansion and spontaneity, get 
stunted and soured, that all their energies are concentrated in a 
hatred of rule and of authority which bursts out, and we know 
with what violence, in after life, when they pass from such a 
servile state to uncontrolled liberty. If we had to found a 
college , it would be desirable to begin by trying to change the 
barrack life by which it was the Emperor’s policy to prepare our 
children for nothing but a regimental life. ,: 





144 


ETON. 


Sect. X. 


intelligence overflow with a sort of expansive 
and respectful serenity, which is not met with 
among the pupils of our scholastic barracks. 
What a difference between such a residence 
and the houses in which we were doomed to 
pass our educational days—gloomy jjrisons, 
blocked up between two streets of Paris, sur¬ 
rounded on all sides by the roofs and chimney 
pots of the neighbouring houses, with two 
rows of sickly trees struggling for life in a 
courtyard, paved or gravelled, and our only 
recreation a miserable walk once a-week or 
fortnight through the guinguettes of the fau¬ 
bourgs ! 

And yet one sees no rudeness or low 
manners in these young people, thus early 
emancipated. On certain gala days the older 
boys figure in court dresses before the Royal 
Family and the aristocracy, and declaim some 
Greek, or Latin, or English speeches, with an 
ease and a simplicity of good taste that prac¬ 
tised orators might envy. 

But to form a just opinion of the antici¬ 
pated manliness of these children of liberty, 
as well as of the general and . energetic 


Sect. X. 


UNIVERSITIES. 


145 


vitality of tlie superior classes in England, 
we must see these boys during their play- 
hours, under the shade of their great trees : 
we shall then understand the saying of the 
Duke of Wellington, when he returned in the 
decline of his days to this beautiful spot, 
where he had been brought up—recollecting 
the plays of his youth, and finding the same 
precocious vigour in the descendants of his 
old playmates and friends, he exclaimed 
aloud—“ It is here that the battle of Waterloo 
was won ! ” 

If we pass from the Schools to the Universi¬ 
ties , we see still more clearly the tie which 
binds education to public life, and the roots 
through which the old British institutions draw 
their robust strength from the unceasingly re¬ 
newed sources of fresh generations. The uni¬ 
versities of Oxford and Cambridge are, in my 
opinion, the real wonder of England. It 
is through them that pass all the Anglican 
clergy, the heirs to the peerage and greater 
properties, the lawyers, men of letters, and 
politicians. Thither the father of a family, 
enriched by trade, industry, or literature, 




146 


UNIVERSITIES. 


Sect. N. 


hastens to send his sons. There, there¬ 
fore, it is, that the directing —the governing 
class of the country, is almost exclusively 
formed. In the list of honours — that is, 
the highest places obtained at the acade¬ 
mical examinations, ever since 1802 , which 
are recorded by each university—we find 
many of the greatest names that England can 
now boast. This list, annually published in 
the newspapers, is looked for by the whole 
nation with a lively interest; and an honour 
thus obtained confers on the parties during 
their whole lives a universally acknowledged 
distinction.* Here it is that the Futurity of 
England incessantly steeps and revivifies her¬ 
self in the waters of the Past. Nowhere else 
in the world is the middle age still alive and 
flourishing as it is at Oxford and Cambridge. 
Nor is it a revival—a factitious restoration—a 
mosaic fortunately discovered and cleared of 


* In Dod’s Parliamentary Companion , a sort of annual report 
of the two Houses, which has in England almost the authority 
of an official report, we always see the University honours care¬ 
fully assigned to the members who have been fortunate enough 
to have made such a debut in public life. 







Sect. X. 


OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 


14T 


the rubbish of revolutions: it bad never 
perished. 

Most of the foundations date from the time 
when England was still Catholic, and they 
have preserved the indelible stamp of their 
origin. The spirit of preservation, which is 
the most precious gift of the English race, 
exists here more strongly than anywhere else. 
In these, the head-quarters of Anglicanism, 
have been maintained with respect, and in 
the most prominent situations, the effigies of 
the two sovereigns whose Catholicism has 
rendered them the most unpopular of all 
British rulers. 

At Cambridge, and there only through the 
three kingdoms, we see the statue of the first 
Queen Mary, so odious to the English people, 
because she attempted by the sad means re¬ 
quired by the intolerance of her age, between 
the brutal Henry VIII. and the merciless 
Elizabeth, to bring back her kingdom to the 
unity of Catholicism. 

At Oxford is equally standing the statue of 
James II., who paid with his crown the 
hazardous honour of having tried to imitate 


148 CONSERVATION OF MONUMENTS. Sect. X. 

Louis XIV., in imposing at the same time 
Catholicism and absolute power on his king¬ 
dom. 

The English people are not subject to that 
odious mania of degrading and of mutilating 
historical monuments, in the vain hope of 
effacing even the remembrance of the victims 
of the passions and of the injustice of revolu¬ 
tions. Quite the reverse. During the most 
discouraging period of the siege of Sebastopol 
the ceremony of the Commemoration took 
place at Oxford, where two generals of the 
Crimean army received the honorary degree 
of Doctors of Law, amidst the warmest ova¬ 
tion of applause that ardent and patriotic 
youths could offer to those distinguished 
veterans. During this ceremony and this 
enthusiasm, and in the hall where it took 
place, there remained the full-length portrait of 
the Emperor of Russia, who had in 1815 par¬ 
ticipated in a similar solemnity. His likeness 
was there as a witness of the Past, and none 
thought of making him pay, by an indignity 
to his portrait, a ransom for the Present. 

Of course, the celebrities belonging more 


Sect. X. CONSERVATION OP MONUMENTS. 


149 


especially to the universities are the objects of 
the highest homage* Where indeed could we 
more rationally expect to find this respect for 
intellectual ancestry than in a corporation 
that, like Trinity College, Cambridge, has 
the signal honour of reckoning on its genea¬ 
logical tree the names of Bacon, Milton, 
Newton, and Byron ?—that is to say, the 
greatest geniuses of England—except Shak- 
speare, who was at no university, and Burke, 
who was educated in Dublin. 

It is evident that this spirit of conserva¬ 
tion is not likely to be confined to material 
monuments, but will also extend itself still 
more energetically to the habits and tradi¬ 
tions which presided over the birth and 
infancy of these great institutions. Here 
everything shows the influence of this pro¬ 
tective spirit. I asked one day the master 
(president, or superior of a college) to give 
me some details on the interior regulations 
of the establishment. “ Nothing is easier,” 
he answered ; “ no alteration has been made 
in the Statutes which were given to us by 
our foundress, the Lady Margaret, Countess 




150 


UNIVERSITY REFORM. 


Sect. X. 


of Richmond, mother of King Henry VII., 
in 1505.” Innovations, when they are to be 
undergone, must come from without—from the 
Government, or Parliament. Thus only has 
Protestantism, and under its most mitigated 
form, been able to penetrate into and invade 
these creations of the old faith. 

Now, however, the most accredited chiefs 
of the two Universities resign themselves to 
the prudent and moderate reforms decreed and 
prepared by Parliament, with the privilege of 
modifying them in their application. They 
work with energy and success to get rid of 
the abuses inseparable from the advantages of 
durability—the trammels of routine, and the 
rust of time. With one hand they open a 
door to religious liberty, while with the other 
they extend the sphere given to physical and 
mathematical sciences. This year, while Lord 
Derby was laying at Oxford the first stone 
of a museum solely destined to objects of 
natural history in this ancient sanctuary be¬ 
longing so exclusively formerly to theological 
and classical studies, Parliament was abrogat- 



Sect. X. INDEPENDENCE OF GOVERNMENT. 151 


ing the oaths which were an interdiction of 
the access of Catholics to this University. 

I do not pretend to describe the interior 
and exterior life of the English Universities. 
If I had leisure to do it, it would be unneces¬ 
sary, having already been so well executed 
by M. Lorain, who, in a memoir presented to 
the French Academy of Moral and Political 
Sciences, has explained with equal authority, 
talent, and accuracy the government and the 
organisation of these great bodies, the rights 
and the functions both of the professors and 
of the students, the system of studies and of 
examinations.* I only wish to point out two 
or three facts which show the fundamental 
analogy of these Universities with the other 
political and social institutions of England, 
and consequently the natural influence that 
they must exercise on the maintenance of the 
old British spirit. 

First, their complete independence of the 

* Memoire sur VUniversite d’Oxford, by M. Lorain, read to 
the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the 22nd and 29th 
of June, 1850 ; Extrait du Compte rendu de VAcademie, redige 
par M. Charles Verge. 



152 INDEPENDENCE OF GOVERNMENT. Sect. X. 

Government. They must, of course, like 
every body, recognise the power of the law 
and the supremacy of Parliament, which, 
however, on its part exercises it with infinite 
reserve. But with the executive power, pro¬ 
perly called Government, it has nothing to 
do. Hardly does it appoint two or three 
professors to each University.* All the 
chiefs of the University, all the members of 
the different colleges whose aggregation forms 
the University, are elected by their peers, 
like the members of the Institute of France, 
but without any intervention, presentation, 
or approbation of the Government. They 
receive from Government neither warrant nor 
salary. They do not render it any account of 
their teaching. The course of studies, the 
conditions of admission, the course of examina¬ 
tion, the regulations for internal and external 
discipline, all is beyond and above the inter¬ 
vention of the Government. The conserva¬ 
tive spirit which has always distinguished 


Namely, those who are called Regius Professors. There are 
seven of them at Oxford, and only two at Cambridge. 




Sect. X. 


OFFICE OF CHANCELLOR. 


153 


the English Universities is then solely the 
spontaneous fruit of independence and of con¬ 
science. The Universities are in this, as in 
everything else, an image of English society 
at large, and, like the other parts of this 
great aristocratical system, free and proud, 
but orderly, and all the more respectful to 
authority from feeling itself independent— 
always accessible to merit—always ready for 
useful progress, for necessary reforms, but 
always solidly resting on the tradition of the 
institution and on the rights of the indi¬ 
vidual. 

And thus it is that the office of Chancellor 
of the University of Oxford or Cambridge, 
conferred for life by election by all the 
doctors and graduates, is considered as a 
supreme honour conferred on a Prince or a 
Peer of England, and that as such it was 
conferred on the Duke of Wellington before 
Lord Derby, as the honour of representing 
one of the Universities in the House of 
Commons is the most sought of all by mi¬ 
nisters and orators, such as Pitt, Peel, and 
Gladstone. 




154 


COLLEGES. 


Sect. X. 


Next to this political independence, the 
circumstance which peculiarly distinguishes 
the English Universities from the establish¬ 
ments bearing the same name on the Con¬ 
tinent is, that each of these is composed of an 
aggregation of twenty distinct Colleges, which 
are so many little republics, of which the 
several founders have been the legislators. 
Each college contains a certain number of 
fellows, varying from ten to a hundred, who 
renew themselves under certain conditions 
established by the founder, and who only 
lose their office by marrying or by volun¬ 
tarily accepting some other benefice. They 
elect from amongst themselves a chief for 
life, and conduct, under his direction, the 
instruction and examination of the students. 
This collegiate education is the basis of the 
existence at the University : each college has 
its laws and particular regulations, honours , 
and special examinations, besides those im¬ 
posed, conferred, or required by the whole 
University. It is, in truth, a moral and 
intellectual federation , of which each branch, 
like the States of North America and the 


Sect. X. 


COLLEGES. 


155 


Cantons of old Switzerland, has a history, 
a legislation, an influence, and a renown 
of its own, but which all come to pour them¬ 
selves, like the confluents of a great river, 
into one common reservoir of strength, of 
honour, and of life. 

Each college has, moreover, its property. 
They have all been richly endowed by their 
founders with landed estates, which, though 
distant and scattered about in many different 
counties, are supposed to be better managed 
than any other property in a country where 
all property is taken good care of—a cogent 
argument against the adversaries of mort¬ 
main. These revenues, added to what the 
students pay, supply the personal and mate¬ 
rial expenses of these colleges, where masters 
and pupils are fed at easy charges, and com¬ 
fortably lodged in edifices whose fine exteriors 
and magnificent halls and chapels rival the 
palaces of the aristocracy. 

Thus, then, are united independence with 
discipline, variety with unity, diversity of 
studies with liberty of choice ; in addition 
to these, the antiquity, the religious and in- 


-156 A TRADITION OF THE MIDDLE AGE. Sect. X. 

tellectual objects 'of the foundations, the ex¬ 
tent and stability of their patrimonial property 
give to these great sanctuaries of education 
in England a character entirely different from 
anything that is to be found on the Continent 
(Belgium only excepted), and which, I must 
repeat, assimilates and associates itself to all 
the other branches of English society. 

We see from what precedes that the Eng¬ 
lish Universities, like the English Constitution 
and the whole frame of English society, are- 
no other than a magnificent tradition of the 
middle age, such as it existed in all western 
Europe. France, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, 
the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Scandi¬ 
navia, possessed formerly some precisely similar 
institutions. The University of Paris was 
organised exactly on the same footing, with 
its numerous and celebrated colleges of Na¬ 
varre, of Beauvais, of Lisieux, of Harcourt, 
&c., most of them founded by the munificence 
of the Bishops and of the local Seigneurs. 
This is so true, that in the discussions that 
took place in the University of Oxford con¬ 
cerning the application of the reforms re- 


Sect. X. 


STUDENTS. 


157 


cently introduced, the parties were obliged to 
look for the solution of some difficulties to 
Du Bold ay’s 4 History of the University of 
Paris.’ So evident and natural is the analogy 
between what we have lost and what the 
English have been so careful to preserve. 

We know, besides, that the word university 
was applied only to independent corporations, 
and never to a system of national and public 
education, which did not exist till Napoleon, 
coming after the Revolutionary deluge had 
swept all away, could imagine no better ex¬ 
pedient than the replacing our eighteen Uni¬ 
versities and the innumerable free-schools for¬ 
merly distributed over the face of France, 
by that system of educational barracks which 
still exists, though modified in its most op¬ 
pressive applications by the law of 1850. 

I shall say but one word of the students,* 
and that will he to notice another and very 
significant contrast between theirs and ours. 
Ours come suddenly out of the servitude of the 
Lycees , where every hour of the day is regu¬ 
lated by an inexorable pattern common to all 
France, and from this servile restraint they are 


158 


DISCIPLINE. 


Sect. X. 


flung at once into the absolute liberty or rather 
licence of a young man’s Parisian life. As 
soon as the schoolboy is transformed into one 
of our collegians, nobody interferes with 
either his studies or conduct. He lodges 
where he pleases, and does what he likes 
from morning till night and from night till 
morning. The English youth leaves a school 
like Eton, where he has felt the enjoyment 
and the responsibility of liberty, only to find 
at' either Oxford or Cambridge a discipline 
almost as severe as that to which he has been 
accustomed all his life. He may spend the 
day as he likes, but he must attend divine 
service twice a-day, and never can appear in 
the streets without his academical dress—a 
long gown and a square cap. Besides, every 
student must have in one of the colleges an 
apartment of his own, but he must dine in 
the common hall with his fellow-students and 
the masters, and he must always be in at 
night at an appointed hour.. Any serious 
contravention to these rules, any offence 
against morality, or even against the manners 
of polished society, brings either, in extreme 


Sect. X. 


DISCIPLINE. 


159 


cases, expulsion from the University, or, for 
minor errors, rustication , that is to say, exile 
for three months, which also entails certain 
pecuniary forfeitures, which of course fall on 
the family of the young delinquent, to the 
amount of forty or fifty pounds. Such is the 
discipline to which the English youths, from 
eighteen to two-and-twenty, submit without 
one word of complaint, and which teaches 
them a sense of personal responsibility and at 
the same time respect for the laws and for 
traditional authority. 

That there should be in these great acade¬ 
mical confederations, where such a number of 
men are congregated together, squabbles, jea¬ 
lousies, petty rivalries, is what no man who 
knows anything of human nature could 
doubt; but experience assures us that, after 
making due allowance for human infirmity, 
there never has been and never can be an 
organisation more conducive to morality,* 

* I speak here relatively of course, and not absolutely. I do 
not pretend to say that the English student’s morals are much 
better than those of the students of France, Germany, and Italy, 
but that they certainly are subjected to a much severer disci¬ 
pline. 



160 


EXTERNAL ASPECT. 


Sect. X. 


and to the freedom and dignity of educa¬ 
tion. 

Numerous objections have been raised 
against the system of education followed by 
these powerful and ancient corporations. 
They are reproached with being too rich, too 
backward, and too sterile—with not keeping 
up to the march of modern ideas—and with 
not publishing many or very considerable 
works. But the English Universities may 
answer their detractors with triumph in 
showing what they have produced, that is, 
the whole English nation represented by 
its more prominent and influential classes. 
They have been instituted — to use a fine 
expression of Dr. Pusey—to make men , and 
not books; and all impartial observers must 
admit that they have admirably fulfilled their 
mission. 

I must not forget the external aspect of 
these Universities, which is at least as start¬ 
ling and as original as their internal organ¬ 
isation ; but I hardly know how to describe 
so striking a picture. Let us imagine con¬ 
gregated in the same town, and contiguously 






Sect. X. 


EXTERNAL ASPECT. 


161 


grouped, fifteen or twenty of our ancient 
abbeys in all the grandeur and magnificence 
of their most flourishing epochs, such as we 
see them in the plates, now so rare, of the 
‘ Monasticon Gallicanum,’ or from the views, 
still rarer, of Cluny, Citeaux, and Clairvaux ; 
each of them having two, or three, or four 
cloisters of round or pointed arches, all 
having large refectories lofty and vaulted like 
churches, with always a library of its own, 
and sometimes with a museum and a gallery of 
pictures, but invariably with a chapel, where 
divine service is performed two or three 
times a-day, with the choral accompaniment 
of ancient music. To be sure, none of these 
buildings, taken separately, are exempt from 
architectural defects; there are, however, but 
very few of them wdiich do not astonish us 
by their grandeur and a picturesque distri¬ 
bution so admirably adapted to their desti¬ 
nation ; and there are very few also which 
do not possess some special merit either of 
style or of antiquity. Many of these are mo¬ 
numents of the highest beauty, such as 
King’s College and the fa<^ade of St. John’s 


162 


SCENERY. 


Sect. X. 


at Cambridge, the cloisters of Magdalen and 
Merton, and the cathedral of Christ Church 
at Oxford. But it is, above all, the extent, 
the number, the approximation, the ensemble 
of these vast and curious edifices which 
have an effect prodigious and unique, that, 
like the Alhambra at Granada and the 
Piazzetta of Venice, leaves an impression 
to be produced nowhere else and never to 
be effaced. 

In this respect Cambridge is perhaps prefer¬ 
able even to Oxford; its seventeen colleges, 
smaller in general than the twenty-four at 
Oxford, are better grouped, and nearer one to 
another. In Cambridge most of them are 
placed in a series, as it were, on the banks 
of a clear and deep stream which waters and 
embellishes a great number of parks, rich in 
such trees as are nowhere else to be seen. 
Each college has its park, and these parks 
have no other division between them than an 
open iron railing or a sunk fence, so that all 
together they have the appearance of a large 
forest, scattered through which emerge the 


Sect. X. 


OXFORD. 


163 


towers, the spires, and embattled roofs of the 
colleges.* 

At Oxford the courts, the gardens, the 
parks, reserved for the recreation of masters 
and students, are still larger and at wider 
intervals. Some are almost in the country ; 
in others, on velvet turf of incomparable ver¬ 
dure, and under the shade of great trees of 
more than secular antiquity, which there as 
everywhere are the greatest ornaments of 
English landscape, you see groups of deer or 
of peacocks, which still occupy those sites 
because the founder of the college desired, 
some three or four centuries since, that it 
should be so. These are the gardens of 
Armida, transported from fairy-land to be a 
real Academus of education—a scene of living 
history. 

That Englishman is to be pitied who has 
not spent there some portion of his youth; 
but much more to be pitied is he who, after 
having lived there, could recollect without 


* This is the walk called the Bachs of the Colleges. 

M 2 




164 VALUE OF UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. Sect. X. 


emotion these courts and their cloisters, these 
lawns and groves, these chapels and their 
chants—he who, when called in the political 
struggles of after-life to discuss and decide 
upon the ideas and institutions of which Ox¬ 
ford and Cambridge are the types and sanc¬ 
tuaries, should not look back on his own 
bright dawn, and think of his children, as 
the poet suggests :— 

“ si quid 

Turpe paras, ne tu pueri contempseris annos: 

Sed peccaturo obsistat tibi filius infans.”* 

But such forgetfulness is as rare as it would 
be deplorable; and as long as the great ma¬ 
jority of the sons of the superior classes is 
educated at the Universities, and as long as 
they are allowed to maintain their inde¬ 
pendence and present organisation, we are 
satisfied that the old English society will 
possess an army of intelligent, devoted, and 
energetic champions, that may bid a bold 
defiance to all her adversaries. 


* Juvenal, xiv. 48. 



Sect. XI. 


PUSEYITES. 


165 


SECTION XI. 

CATHOLICISM IN ENGLAND. 

There is, however, a wonder more striking 
than all the wonders of Oxford and Cam¬ 
bridge—I mean the moral courage of those 
who have resigned the happiness of such a 
residence—who have sacrificed high positions 
—who have quitted those enchanting spots, 
and broken the strongest ties of a man’s heart 
to re-enter the unity of Catholicism. We 
know that Oxford was the place where tfiose 
eminent men, designated very improperly 
under the name of Puseyites , after having 
tried, but in vain, to regenerate the Anglican 
church, ended by confessing Catholic truth, 
and abandoning for it their benefices, their 
hardly-earned positions, their legitimate am¬ 
bition, their popularity, their domestic com¬ 
forts, their means of subsistence, and too 
often their dearest friendships—such men as 


166 


PUSEYITES. 


Sect. XI. 


Manning, Newman, Faber, Wilberforce, who 
were, even by the admission of those who 
have not followed their glorious example, the 
first of men — first for their virtue as well as 
for their talent, their science, and their elo¬ 
quence. It will be an eternal honour to the 
Catholic church of the nineteenth century to 
have recovered such noble beings by the 
means of study and conviction only, without 
any constraint or any help from either 
authority or public opinion. It will also be 
an eternal honour to England to have given 
birth to such followers of truth, and to have 
given the world, in a time like ours, so 
engrossed by the love of worldly gain, an 
example of the generous sacrifice of all the 
enjoyments of material and intellectual life 
to the happiness of following the dictates of a 
conscience subdued and enlightened by faith. 

We understand at once all the merit and 
all the consolation of such a sacrifice, when, 
coming out of those academical cloisters and 
palaces, preserved by the national spirit of a 
great people, but diverted by schism fro m 
Catholic truth, we kneel at the foot of the 


Sect. XI. 


PUSEYITES. 


167 


altar, where this truth is still preserved, in 
the poor, small chapel which, under the safe¬ 
guard of religious liberty, is allowed to stand 
in one of the remote and neglected outskirts 
of the town. 

On Sundays, or on one of the festivals 
suppressed by the Keformation, but celebrated 
formerly with such pomp in one of these 
basilica, which have retained no other trace 
of Catholicism than their architectural beauty 
and their names—to them a living reproof* 
—the traveller must tear himself from the 
seduction of these splendours, now usurped 
by the greedy pride of the Anglicans, to 
go and worship elsewhere the God of the 
humble and of the poor. He must enter 
this modest* dark, and low sanctuary, but 
which, at Cambridge at least, has received in 
its poverty, from the hand of Pugin, a look of 
the architectural renaissance. He may meet 


* There is a Corpus Christi College at Oxford, and another at 
Cambridge, though the Anglican Church does not admit Transub- 
stantiation. There is also All Souls College, although the prayers 
for the dead, are interdicted; and the Colleges of St. Magdalen 
St. John, St. Alban, St. Edward, although intercession to the 
Saints is prohibited. 



168 DELIGHTS OF CATHOLIC WORSHIP. Sect. XI. 

there, perhaps, a descendant of one of those 
ancient races of Norman gentlemen whose 
faith has victoriously braved during ten 
generations proscription and contempt. He 
will find himself placed near a poor servant 
maid, who also has endured all, sacrificed all 
for the truth. 

He will see one or two students, fearful 
and curious, who come to see, and not to pray ; 
some artisans, Irish labourers, ragged mis¬ 
sionaries of the old religion. But he will feel 
the contagion of an unusual fervour * a sweet 
and noble emotion will fill his heart; he will 
taste there in all its purity the delight of 
belonging to that church which, after so 
many losses and so many misfortunes, sur¬ 
vives them all and gets younger and stronger. 
And then the consciousness of a supernatural 
strength and greatness will take possession of 
him. He will say to himsell with a just pride 
that the majesty of the Engdish people is less 
imposing — its secular constitution less an¬ 
cient—its robust society less solid, and that 
immense British empire, on which the sun 
never sets, less immense than that great 


Sect. XI. WANT OF UNITY DEPLORED. 


169 


Church of which he, a stranger, is, with 
these poor, disinherited votaries, the child 
and the representative in this usurped land. 

But it is also at such moments that every 
Catholic laments bitterly that the impenetra¬ 
ble will of God should have permitted such a 
country to be severed from the Catholic 
unity. 

Although England has preserved more 
than any other nation the Catholic spirit of 
the middle- age, her virtue and her grandeur 
have still too much of ancient Borne. Chris¬ 
tian at heart and in feeling, she would 
need constantly to refresh herself in the 
Christian spirit of which modern Borne is the 
only pure reservoir. But how much for 
three centuries, and even at this hour, has 
the Church not had to deplore the hostility, 
or even the indifference of this great nation! 
Alas! the Church is wanting to England, and 
England to the Church. What would not the 
English, if they had remained true to the old 
faith, have done for it with their indefatigable 
activity, their indomitable energy, the pro¬ 
pagandising influence of their commerce, their 


170 


WANT OF UNITY DEPLORED. 


Sect. XI. 


fleet, the munificence of their contributions, 
now so profusely given to error! 

What strength—what help, the Roman 
church would have found there! what an 
abundant harvest in the race who gave to 
ecclesiastical liberty St. Anselm, St. Thomas, 
St. Edmund, the most valiant champions that 
the Church ever had—that race which now 
dedicates so many treasures of money and 
perseverance to the propagation of an erro¬ 
neous and impotent Christianity! 

What a compensation it would be for the 
Church !—what a contrast with the Southern 
nations, which now, after two centuries of 
sterility and of decline, are on the high road 
to apostacy ! But what a benign and salu¬ 
tary influence would Catholicism have exer¬ 
cised over the hearts of the English people ! 
How it would have softened its unbending 
disposition, purified its asperity, and above 
all, diminished its implacable egotism! She 
would then have realised the ideal of a 
Catholic nation, with all the civilisation of 
modern days. 

But God decreed otherwise. The spirit of 



Sect. XI. A RECONCILIATION DESIRABLE. 


171 


evil has prevailed. The tie which for a 
thousand years united England with Rome 
has been violently broken. Rome and Eng¬ 
land have been ever since, and still are, in 
violent contention—a struggle all the more , 
alarming, because since the Revolution events 
have brought them into more direct collision, 
and, as it were, face to face. 

Thus it is that Rome and England, like 
two souls made to understand and love each 
other, but severed by some fatal error—the 
fault of a day, of a moment perhaps—become 
alienated for ever, and follow side by side, in 
constant conflict, and with mutual injury, the 
road which, if they were in peace and union, 
would have led them to the height of joy 
and felicity: and yet nevertheless a ray of 
light—some misfortune—one of those chances 
which reveal the mysteries of an Almighty 
Providence, might even now suffice for good, 
as it formerly did for evil; and surely, of 
all the reconciliations which the world has 
witnessed, this reconciliation would be the 
happiest and the most fruitful. 

I have no intention of examining here in 



172 INCREASE OF CATHOLICISM. Sect. XI. 

detail the situation of England in a religious 
point of view, nor will I attempt to discuss 
what futurity may have in reserve for Catho¬ 
licism or Anglicanism. That in itself would 
require a volume. I even beg my readers to 
remember that I have undertaken to write of 
England in a political, and not in a religious 
point of view. This sufficiently explains 
why I enlarge on some questions, while I say 
nothing of others of greater importance. 

There is, however, one fact too manifest 
and too important, even in a political view, 
not to be mentioned here. 

Since the Emancipation so gloriously ob¬ 
tained by O’Connell, twenty-five years ago, 
Catholicism has been on the increase through 
all the British empire; not only in Ireland, 
but in England, and even in Puritan Scot¬ 
land, and still more especially in the English 
colonies, where the number of Catholic dio¬ 
ceses, parishes, churches, monasteries, and 
religious congregations increases rapidly and 
steadily. 

In London, in one of the most conspicuous 
points of one of the populous suburbs, the 


Sect. XI. 


PROTESTANT ANIMOSITY. 


173 


astonished passenger sees a vast assemblage 
of Gothic edifices, an admirable church, an 
episcopal residence, a parsonage, schools, 
and an establishment of Sisters of Mercy. 
This is St. George’s, Southwark—this is the 
sanctuary where, under the name of the 
patron of old England, the triumphant flag 
of faith and religious liberty is raised, in the 
centre of a busy neighbourhood, and in the 
midst of a noisy, and either hostile or mostly 
indifferent crowd. 

But Protestant animosity, which had slum¬ 
bered so long, is roused. The indifference, or 
indulgence, which had gone so far as to recon¬ 
cile the public mind to the presence of a nuncio 
of the Holy See at the English Court,* has dis¬ 
appeared to give place to invectives, both offi¬ 
cial and popular, against the papacy. Is this 
deplorable change to be attributed to the way 


* The law for re-establishing diplomatic relations between the 
two courts had passed the House of Commons ; hut an amend¬ 
ment introduced in the House of Lords by a Scotch fanatic, Lord 
Eglinton, who insisted that the Pope should only send laymen as 
envoys, rendered this law useless. It is very possible that Lord 
Eglinton, without being aware of it, has rendered a very great 
service to the Catholic church and to the Holy See. 



174 CONVERSIONS TO CATHOLICISM. Sect. XI. 


in which was promulgated and applied the 
Bull of 1850, re-establishing in England the 
episcopal hierarchy, and which, in the annals 
of the Church, will attach to the pontificate 
of Pius IX. a glory so rare and so envi¬ 
able ? Many think so. I incline to believe 
that they are mistaken, and that there is in 
this but a natural consequence of the unex¬ 
pected progress of a faith supposed to be 
extinct, and above all of the numerous con¬ 
versions which have, as it were, beheaded 
the Anglican clergy, by depriving it of its 
most eminent theologians and its most exem¬ 
plary ministers. 

But there is an apprehension that I must 
be permitted to express, not, however, with¬ 
out a respectful diffidence. I feel the great¬ 
est respect for every English Catholic. No 
one in the Christian universe has deserved 
more than they do from the orthodox Faith. 
Some families have kept it intact through 
three centuries of affronts and of persecutions. 
Others have regained it at the cost of sacri¬ 
fices of which our age had no conception. 
Nevertheless I fear that among those generous 


Sect, XI. 


NATIONAL FEELING. 


175 


neopliytes who have honoured and consoled 
the Church, and who now, in sacred orders or 
in the Catholic press, devote themselves to 
the defence of their new faith, there may he 
some who do not sufficiently dread the danger 
of hurting or braving the national feeling—a 
feeling of which it is always so dangerous to 
make an enemy, and which is nowhere more 
powerful and more susceptible than in Eng¬ 
land. 

I shall never believe what we constantly 
hear objected by the enemies of the true faith, 
that an Englishman, in becoming a Catholic, 
as his fathers were three hundred years ago, 
would become estranged from his own coun¬ 
try, and assimilated to an Italian or a French¬ 
man. 

The glory of the Catholic Church—one of 
the conditions and of the consequences of her 
immortality—is to render herself always all to 
all. It is to lend herself with an indefatiga¬ 
ble flexibility to the institutions, the manners, 
the ideas of all countries and of all ages, in 
all that is not incompatible with faith and 
Christian virtue. It is to allow all her chil- 





176 CATHOLIC FLEXIBILITY. Sect. XI. 

dren to have, as it were, a private residence— 
to possess a peculiar patrimony of their own, 
in the midst of that incomparable Catholic 
unity which does triumph over all, and sur¬ 
vives to all only by its elasticity and its uni¬ 
versality. “ In my Father’s house there are 
many mansions.” 

England above all claims and deserves in 
this respect some special precautions; for we 
must recollect that it is not a heathen country. 
We cannot treat her as we do the islands of 
the South Sea, or the plains of Thibet. It is 
a Christian country, where Christianity, 
though mutilated and disfigured, and in 
rebellion against the only legitimate ecclesi¬ 
astical authority, still possesses an energy, a 
force, and a fecundity which is not to be 
despised. Moreover, it is a country which 
was Catholic for a thousand years — three 
times longer than it has been Protestant, 
and where Catholicism has imprinted nume¬ 
rous and indelible vestiges of its empire. 
This being the case, it is evident that the 
most honest and able, as well as the easiest 
tactic for the new Catholics would be a 


Sect. XI. BEST INSTITUTIONS CATHOLIC. 


177 


constant appeal to the past, which no Eng¬ 
lishman repudiates, and to carry hack as 
to it, to its source, all the improvements and 
developments of modern civilisation. The 
most venerated institutions of England, her 
best and purest glories, are connected with 
Catholicism. Trial by jury, the Parliament, 
the Universities, date from the time when 
England was the submissive daughter of the 
Holy See. It was Catholic barons got Magna 
Charta from King John. Irish Catholics 
constituted the principal strength of the Eng¬ 
lish armies in the Peninsula and in the 
Crimea. Except Queen Elizabeth, the only 
sovereigns of whom the people have kept the 
memory are Catholic kings—Alfred, Edward 
the Confessor, Richard Cceur de Lion, Ed¬ 
ward III., Henry Y. The cathedrals, the 
churches, the castles—all those ecclesiastical 
and feudal edifices—which was an English 
taste before it was ours, and which they pre¬ 
serve or restore with such pious care, are 
exclusively the work of Catholic generations. 
The fervent devotion of the new Catholics 
finds heaven peopled with English saints, 

N 





178 BEST INSTITUTIONS CATHOLIC. Sect. XI. 

from St. Wilfrid and St. Boniface to St. 
Thomas of Canterbury. All this is the patri¬ 
mony, the treasure of the English Catholics. 
Why then should they not remain English— 
as English as any ? Why should they borrow 
from other countries, ideas, manners, forms, 
which, innocent, and even laudable in them¬ 
selves, may excite the antipathy of the Eng¬ 
lish people, and help to entertain that well- 
rooted and powerful prejudice which has 
made them abjure Popery as a religion essen¬ 
tially anti-national ?* Why disdain the 
recollections and guarantees of old England ? 
Why, above all, should they affect indiffer¬ 
ence or dislike for the great principles of 
liberty which are the very life of England— 
principles which arise from a constitution 
made by the Catholics of the middle ages, 
and which give to the modern Catholics the 
only strength that they can oppose to vic¬ 
torious Protestantism ?j 

* More than one historian of credit has affirmed that if Queen 
Mary had not, in marrying Philip II., appeared to identify the 
Catholic cause with the Spanish and Continental spirit, the 
ancient religion might have been solidly established. 

t There is a Catholic newspaper published in Dublin which 



Sect. XT. 


179 


LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE. 


- . - y i 

I fear lest the 'ideas which have been 
gaining ground for four years amongst some 
Catholics on the Continent should infect the 
present generation of our brethren on the 
other side of the Channel. The English 

r. r < ♦ 

Catholics, in imitating the examples of this 
school, which has taken the Duke of Alba 
for one of its heroes, and the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes as one of its triumphs, 
would renounce their most powerful weapon, 
the only one indeed invincible in our days. 

Liberty of conscience, independent of all 
human law—the tutelary principle that the 
English Catholics have the glory of having 
been the first to plant as early as the seven¬ 
teenth century in the New World,* is their 
strength and their glory in their mother- 
country. They have a right to make it their 


every week has two or three invectives against the very constitu¬ 
tion in virtue of which it has a right to express its opinion, and 
to abuse everything English without danger and without restric¬ 
tion. 

* In Maryland State, founded by Lord Baltimore in 1632, at 
the head of a Catholic colony which took for the basis of its con¬ 
stitution religious liberty and the representative system, princi¬ 
ples that no other colony had as yet admitted. It remains the 
principal centre of the Catholic religion in the United States. 

N 2 




ISO 


LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE. 


Sect. XI. 


property as well as their occasional arm; for 
this princijile, so often invoked by the Pro¬ 
testants, is always repudiated by them in 

rrt)(n «oiij fiff^ioi 

practice. Wherever Protestants have become 

Til LY) r IQ • 

masters, they have thought themselves obliged 
to ignore or to abrogate it. 1 

One of the most ardent admirers of the 
Reformation has proclaimed this recently :— 
“ Wherever liberty has been given to 
the rival Church, Protestantism has 
very soon disappeared, defeated, dis¬ 
honoured.” * What a confession! and 
what a lesson ! Thank heaven ! Catholicism 
has nothing of the sort to fear. It is 
nowhere more flourishing, more vigorous, 
more triumphant than it is where the rival 
Churches enjoy in fact and in rights the 
most complete liberty, as in France and in 
Belgium. Much stronger is it than where it 
has slumbered so long, and where it fancies 
itself sheltered by the chimerical theory of 
its exclusive domination, as in Spain, in 
Portugal, and in Italy. The fanaticism of 


* Edgard Quinet, Marnix de Sainte Aldcgonde, 1854. 



Sect. XI. POLITICAL LIBERTY. 181 

the Know-nothings in America is but a humi¬ 
liating consequence of the powerless rage of 
Protestantism against the prodigious increase 
of Catholicism, which it owes to the mere 

■ - / ,h 3Tm>J89j011 lOVO'i 1 

strength of religious liberty.* 

But it is especially in England that expe¬ 
rience is conclusive for the Catholics. With¬ 
out political liberty they were powerless ; 
with it everything is become powerless 
against them. The Catholics owe everything 
to liberty; nothing to temporal authority. 
Neither Philip II. nor James II. were able to 
avert their defeat; but from the moment 
that they claimed only the common rights, 
when they retorted against their adversaries 
the principle of liberty of conscience, all the 
power and all the prejudices of England have 
vainly tried to compress their efforts. 


* The two most important organs of the Catholic press in the 
United States, the Quarterly Review of the eloquent and learned 
Mr. Brownson, which is published at Boston, and the Freeman’s 
Journal , which is published at New York, though agreeing very 
seldom, are unanimous in asserting that the attempts of the 
Know-Nothings are of no serious danger to the existence of 
Catholicism in America. They both protest against the alarms 
created on this subject in Europe. 



182 LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS. Sect. XL 

A hundred years ago, when the last of the 
Stuarts tried to reconquer the throne of his 
fathers, they were nothing more than a hand¬ 
ful of poor creatures, forgotten even by the 
Catholic w T orld; now wherever the English 
flag is flying in the five parts of the world, 
it shelters a church and school and a colony 
Catholic and free.* 

Such is the strength of liberal institutions 
sincerely put in joractice, that their spirit 
ends in overcoming national manners and 
the most inveterate prejudices, and even the 
most stringent laws. Can we fancy the appli¬ 
cation of a measure like that of the re-esta¬ 
blishment of the Catholic hierarchy by Pius 
IX. in a Protestant country which should be 
governed as is the kingdom of Naples ? It 
would be simply impossible. Well, in Eng¬ 
land, notwithstanding the effervescence of the 


* We read lately in the Waterford Chronicle the touching 
letter of an Irish soldier in the 84th regiment of infantry, stationed 
at Rangoon, in the Birman empire. He mentioned a church that 
he and his comrades were building with a voluntary subscription 
of a thousand pounds, and two hundred added by Government. 
It was, he said, the third Catholic church that he had seen beiim 
constructed since he had been in India. 



183 


« 


Sect. XI. RESTRICTIONS POWERLESS. 

popular passions, that measure has met, 
thanks to political and religious liberty, no 

i' •» r r , , 

serious obstacle, and the opposition has only 

> 

accelerated the Catholic movement.* 

f • f f 7- * • . , 

All the restrictions imposed by the Act of 
1829 to the development of the Jesuits and 
other religious orders, all the penalties re¬ 
cently decreed against the taking public pos¬ 
session of Episcopalian titles, have been abso¬ 
lutely and ridiculously powerless, thanks to 
the liberty of association, the liberty of tui¬ 
tion, and the liberty of the press, of which 
it is no longer possible to deprive an English 
citizen. Laws must be made individually and 
nominatively to deprive of this liberty such 
and such a man on account of the religion he 
professes; and if such laws were now made, 
judges, agents, and denunciators must he 
specially found to apply them. That was done 
formerly, hut now the force of liberal habits 
would not allow the public passions to go to 


* Since 1851 the number of Catholic churches in the twelve 
dioceses newly established has risen from 586 to 653, that is to 
say, by an eighth ; the nunneries from 53 to 82, that is, by a 
half. ‘ 



184 


CATHOLIC AIMS. 


Sect. XI. 


this extremity. The pride of the Anglicans 
and the fanaticism of the Dissenters would 
rejoice at seeing English and Irish Catholics 
replunged in their former slavery ; but, placed 
under the protection of the principles and 
the practice of a Government sincerely con¬ 
stitutional, the Catholics have until now 
braved with triumph the hatred and the 
malice of their enemies. Their churches, 
their houses of education, and their monas¬ 
teries for both sexes are founded, are peopled, 
and are maintained with a facility and a 
liberty which not only is not surpassed, but 
which is not even equalled, in any country of 
the world, be it Catholic or Protestant. Their 
liberty may now be reckoned as beyond all 
danger. What remains to them now is to 
obtain in practice a more sincere and equit¬ 
able observation of the principles of equality 
in all that refers to the nomination to employ¬ 
ments—an equal share in public grants—the 
intervention of ecclesiastics paid by the state 
in the army, in the prisons, and in the hos¬ 
pitals and this they will attain; slowly, 
perhaps, but they will attain it: their rights, 


Sect. XI. - '/ IRELAND.! > 185 

their rapidly increasing numbers, the neces¬ 
sities of the time in which we live—every¬ 
thing is for them. 

In maintaining the ground where O’Connell 
planted their flag, they are unattackable and 
are sure to advance; but if they leave it 
to adopt the intolerant and despotic theories 
of some Catholic writers on the Continent, 
they open a breach to attacks as dangerous to 
them as easy to the enemy; they will become 
again and will remain foreigners at home; 
they will render the abyss which separates 
them from their Protestant brothers deeper 
and more impassable : for we must not deceive 
ourselves ; however strong may be the recent 
enthusiasm of the English for certain new 
shapes of authority introduced in the world, 
they enter into it with so much effusion only 
because they feel certain, with a confidence 
perhaps ill founded, that they are themselves 
safe from the possibility of such a system. 

It is impossible to speak of Catholicism in 
England without giving a few thoughts and 
lines to Ireland, which has been till now the 
heart and bulwark of its strength. 



186 IRELAND. :>Ij < > n L Sect. XI. " 

I feel honoured to have been the first to 
point out to the French Catholics the suffer¬ 
ings and the glory of their Irish brethren.* 
The Emancipation Act had then just passed, 
and Ireland was beginning again to be reck¬ 
oned amongst the countries of Europe. 

We know what an important part has since 
been taken by the Irish representatives in the 
English Parliament, and how, under O’Con¬ 
nell’s guidance, they have ensured a definitive 
preponderance to Whig politics. 

Hardly was this great man dead when a 
disastrous famine, caused by the potato-dis¬ 
ease, came to decimate a population which 
owed to the too easy culture of this root an 
increase out of ail proportion to its resources; 
but, by a mysterious dispensation of Divine 
goodness, this hard trial is become the start¬ 
ing-point of a considerably better condition. 
An immense emigration, carrying with it 
everywhere the Catholic faith, was organised. 
The Irish race now expands itself in Australia, 


* Letters on Catholicism in Ireland, addressed to the Journal 
L'Avenir, November, 1830. 



Sect. XI. 


CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA. 


187 


Canada, and in the United States. It has 
been calculated that in two years one million 
three hundred thousand Irish have landed 
in America. From this arises a double benefit. 
First, the Church has received in the United 

D 

States an immense reinforcement, which has 
enabled her to take prodigious developments, 
against which the fanaticism of the Know- 
nothings struggles in vain, and to increase the 
number of the Catholics, which was only 
25,000 in 1789,* to more than 1,000,000 in 
1855 for the ecclesiastical province of New 
York alone.f And while Ireland was thus 
giving her famished but ever faithful children 
to people the New World, she was re-esta¬ 
blishing her own equilibrium. The number 
of individuals who receive the succours of 
public charity, and which was in January, 
1849, as high as 620,147, was reduced in 
January, 1855, to 106,802, notwithstanding 
the bad harvest of last year. Everything 
indicates that poverty is every day diminish- 


* When the first Catholic bishopric was founded at Baltimore, 
f There are in the United States three other metropolitan or 
ecclesiastical provinces—Baltimore, Cincinnati, Oregon. 



188 LANDED PROPERTY IN IRELAND. Sect. XI. 

-i i ■ TTr 

ing, and several bishops Lave used their 
moral authority to prevent their flocks from 
following the current of emigration. 

But another change still more important, 
and a thousand times more beneficial, has 
passed silently, unperceived among us. The 
territorial property in Ireland, which had 
long ago passed into the hands of Protestants 
of English and Scotch origin by the con¬ 
fiscations en inasse under Elizabeth and by 
Cromwell, had become greatly in debt, and 
mortgaged to an exorbitant degree. Their 
possession had become more onerous than 
profitable; but expropriation was impossible, 
or nearly so, on account of the numerous 
obstacles that English legislation opposes to 
the sale of landed property. Creditors and 
debtors were equally victims of this, and the 
unfortunate tenants suffered more than either. 
This aristocracy, foreign by origin and by 
faith to the country of which it sucked the 
substance, did not even reside in that 
country; it did not render it any of the 
services rendered in England by large pro¬ 
perties; it was to unfortunate Ireland a 


Sect. XI. ENCUMBERED ESTATES BILL. 189 

weight more crushing even than that of the 
Anglican Church. 

• • f 

But a recent Act of Parliament, known 
under the name of Encumbered Estates Bib, 
will gradually deliver the country, and will 
change the face of Ireland. A commission of 
lawyers has been appointed to bring into the 
market and sell by an expeditious process and 
in lots the encumbered properties throughout 
the island. This commission has done its 
work and continues to do it with complete 
success. The property thus changes hands, 
and, what is still better, it passes into those 
of Catholics. In fact, the ancient Catholic 
families of Ireland were dispossessed in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of their 
territorial property; and the new families, 
enriched by trade and industry, could not 
easily obtain a landed investment. Now, 
thanks to the intervention of the new law, 
they may invest their savings and their 
capital in buying lots of the divided and dis¬ 
persed domains of the Protestant aristocracy. 
Many English capitalists come to seize this 
prey ; hut it is said that the majority of the 


190 SUBDIVISION OP PROPERTY. Sect. XI. 

new purchasers belongs to the middle class 
of Irish Catholics. This being so, Ireland 
will have what she most wanted—a class of 
landlords united to the people by their re¬ 
ligion, and not rich enough to go and spend 
their revenues out of the country. This will 
be quite a revolution—a fruitful, legitimate, 
beneficent revolution—which will be the coun¬ 
terpoise ot those which have until now ruined 
Ireland. This subdivision will have there 
none of the inconveniences it brings with it 
in France. There it is but a transitory mea¬ 
sure, of which the fatal effects will disappear 
by the mere action of the general law affect¬ 
ing landed inheritances, for no one would now 
venture to imitate the old Protestant con¬ 
querors (ol whom we spoke before) who had 
condemned the Irish Catholics to an equal 
division of their property amongst all their 
children, with the intention, but too well gra¬ 
tified, of thus destroying their fortune and 
their social influence. 


Sect. XII. ANGLICAN CHURCH. 191 


aajflo elloim or it ot 

8gtI0 iod 8T98G 

hrrjflo'il ,08 gidod h 

ihlT aoilodtr 

to 88;ilo G—1)91X1 S"/f 

laOlii 0U8 tG.dvv 

-9-1 iraxft V SECTION NIL 


kcmqa brij? o*g oi if^jviano dorr ton fm; . 

Iliw glllT ; :II ANGLICANISM. 

.9lRfnilroof lidfl ft: ,<■> jo.L -t /./< u 

Then as to the Anglican clergy whose 

wealth is in Ireland, an evil without reason 
and without excuse, and which is doomed 
very shortly to disappear; but it would be a 
grave error to confound, or even to assimilate, 
the part and the influence of this clergy in 
England with its abusive and deleterious 
existence in Ireland. It is right that we 
should have an exact idea of what the Angli¬ 
can Church is at home, where she has become 
the national, traditional Church, the Church 
of the people, and more especially of the 
country people. We are of course not in¬ 
clined to exaggerate its merits ; but let us 
not fall into the other extreme of exaggerating 
its weakness and tendency to decline, for fear 
of again incurring the disappointment and 
ridicule of which we have been more than 


192 


ANGLICAN CHURCH. 


Sect. XII. 


once tlie victims. Let ns reject and avoid 
those injurious and unfounded declamations, 
those scandalous anecdotes, true or false, which 
are a repetition of the same kind of libels as 
were promulgated against the monks and the 
clergy of old France, and what is repeated 
every day in England against Rome. These 
things prove nothing—absolutely nothing— 
against the vitality of the institution itself. 
It is the glory of Catholicism not to fear the 
strength or power of any antagonist. Its 
votaries ought to consider it their privilege to 
leave—without regret, and above all unimi¬ 
tated— to the promoters of schism and of 
incredulity the wretched weapons of invec¬ 
tives, of derision, and more especially of 
calumny against ecclesiastic persons and ap¬ 
purtenances. 

We shall certainly not find in the Anglican 
clergy the passionate ardour for doing good, 
the tender and generous solicitude for the 
salvation of souls, the daily practice of self- 
sacrifice in all that is most humble and 
heroic, all of which have never been more 
honoured in the Catholic priesthood than in 


Sect. XII. 


ANGLICAN CHURCH. 


193 


our age in France, in Germany, in Belgium, 
in Ireland, and everywhere, so that the con¬ 
soling certainty of the immense superiority of 
the Catholic clergy suffices—-more than suf¬ 
fices—to keep us from the fear of rendering 
too much justice to the adversary. 

To appreciate the solid value of Anglican¬ 
ism, to encounter it with advantage, and to 
discover its weak points, we must then begin 
by recognising the strength which lurks under 
its apparent torpor. We must, above all, 
not judge of it from the patterns of Protest¬ 
antism that we see in France or at Geneva. 
To see in Protestantism such as it is in the 
national Church of England, what it is in 
several other sects — a negative religion — 
would be a gross error. The religion of the 
English has, on the contrary, all the charac¬ 
teristics of a positive, substantial religion, 
incomplete as it is, and sovereignly illogic. 
A faith, sincere and even fervent, in the 
Divinity and in the merits of our Lord Jesus 
Christ fills the souls of a number of laymen 
and of ministers of the Anglican Church. 
This is certainly not enough : what is it to 

o 


194 REVIVAL OF RELIGIOUS FEELING. Sect. NIL 

V V* J •ULIUU/i.LLu KJ ru.MJLj±\J Jf U.V7 III 1 JLX T fil/I *1 J u3 f J< 

believe in the Son of God without believing 
fg the authority and the sacraments that He 
instituted ? We must then pity the Anglicans 
to be contented with so insufficient and so 
illogical a solution of the problem propounded 
by conscience and by nature; but we cannot 
deny the good faith of many, nor the deep 
and serious influence exercised over a great 
number of souls by the forms of worship and 
doctrine of Anglicanism. 

It is incontestable that there has been a re¬ 
vival of religious feeling in England amongst 
the Anglicans as well as amongst the Catholics 
since the beginning of this century. It has 
been at once a revival of faith and a renewal 
of Christian manners. The general morality 
of English society has undoubtedly improved 
since that period. Whoever has known the 
habits and manners of the superior classes 
towards the end of George III.’s reign cannot 
help being struck with the change. The most 
frivolous as well as the most competent agree 
on that subject. The scandals then so nu¬ 
merous in the higher ranks are diminishing 
every day, and will soon disappear entirely. 


Sect. XII. APATHY OP WORKING CLASSES. 195 

When such things do happen, they excite, in 
a country where everything is told and every¬ 
thing published, a reprobation which is heard 
from one end of Great Britain to the other. 

An open and practical profession of reli¬ 
gious feeling, assiduity at public worship, a 
lively interest in all religious questions, with 
an active and constant solicitude for the poor 
and ignorant classes, are now the characteris¬ 
tics of a considerable portion, if not the ma¬ 
jority of the English Aristocracy. A corre¬ 
sponding feeling is unfortunately not to be 
found in the working-classes, more especially 
in the towns. There an almost absolute in¬ 
difference and ignorance in religious matters 
exist, in a proportion sadly analogous to that 
of the population. But still this Christian 
regeneration in the heads of society is a salu¬ 
tary and encouraging symptom, in a country 
where the example of the superior classes is 
still so powerful, and their political and social 
influence so very considerable. The English 
Aristocracy is to be honoured and congratu¬ 
lated for not having waited for the revolution¬ 
ary deluge, before it put a stop to the cor- 

o 2 


196 


WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. 


Sect. XII. 


ruption which threatened to drown it, and 
which has everywhere else subdued and 
enervated its victims before it finally de¬ 
stroyed them. 

I do not think that any important share in 
this amelioration can be attributed to the 
Anglican Clergy. It seems rather to have 
begun with a few laymen, and above any, 
with William Wilberforce,* the illustrious 
author of the abolition of the slave-trade. 
The public and private life of this great man 
offers such a perfect pattern of fervour, of 
charity, of Christian humility, that I find it 
difficult to understand how so many virtues 
could exist beyond the bosom of supreme 
truth—the Catholic Church.*)* 

* We see in the Journal of his Life that he constantly com¬ 
plained of the lukewarmness and indifference of the bishops and 
of the high clergy from 1790 to 1797, when he published his 
book called ‘ Practical Christianity,’ which has opened a new era 
in the history of Anglicanism. 

f The Life of Wilberforce (born in 1759, deceased in 1833) has 
been written in five volumes by his two sons, one of whom is 
now Anglican Bishop of Oxford, and the other has recently 
renounced one of the highest dignities of the Established Church 
to enter into the way of truth. I do not know a book which 
gives a juster idea of the duties and merits of the public man, 
who desires to serve God and his neighbour in public life, than 



Sect. XII. 


ANGLICAN CLEEGY. 


197 


However, without having had the honour 
of giving birth to this revival, the Anglican 
clergy has taken its part in it, and has reaped 
the good of it. It could not well be other¬ 
wise. This clergy is a branch of the Aris¬ 
tocracy, whose strength and whose weakness 
it shares. Here, as it was formerly in 
France, the ecclesiastical career is one of the 
most sought after by the younger sons of 
ancient and opulent families. 

Besides, all, or almost all, the clergy are 
educated at Oxford or Cambridge, with the 
children of the Aristocracy. It was, then, no 
more than natural to see the clergy follow 
the guiding class in its return to religion. 

Then came what was called the Oxford 
movement , inaugurated by the celebrated Doc¬ 
tor Pusey; and although it carried the most 
eminent amongst its promoters into the bosom 
of the Catholic Church, it nevertheless ex¬ 
erted a durable and fructifying action on 
Anglicanism itself.* 

VVilberforce’s example during tlie forty-five years that he was in 
the House of Commons. 

* Twenty-five years ago, if an Oxford Undergraduate had been 



198 


ANGLICAN CLEEGY. 


Sect. XII. 


The race of hunting, drinking, bons-vivants 
clergy, of whom we have seen and heard so 
much, and of whom anybody who lived in Eng¬ 
land thirty years ago must have a clear recol¬ 
lection, is completely gone by. It has been 
replaced by a clergy in which, though there is 
still an admixture of inferior and imperfect 
elements, there are also a vast number of 
studious, austere, pious, and charitable men. 
This charity, the ancient inheritance of the 
Church that this clergy replaces, has survived 
all their disorders, and has acquired of late 
additional developement. 

The popular instruction in the country is 
almost entirely at the expense of the clergy. 
They provide for it by contributions from 
their income, and as early as 1847 they could 
show with pride 21,000 schools, 1,500,000 
children, and 81,000 schoolmasters, that they 
maintain at an annual expense of 22,000,000 


seen to communicate (according to tlie Anglican rite), lie would 
have excited as much surprise as an eleve from the Ecole Poly¬ 
technique at the same time with us. In 1855, of 100 students 
at Merton College {Merton College gave Mr. Manning to the 
Church ), 45 used to receive the communion weekly. 



Sect. XII. 


ANGLICAN CLERGY. 


199 


francs* (about 900,000/.) Let the most Com¬ 
petent judges, and those most interested in 
pointing out the defects of the Anglican 
clergy, be consulted on this subject, more 
especially the members of that clergy who 
have left it to become Catholics; they will 
all tell you that they have left behind, in 
the English Church, much regularity, pre¬ 
cious dispositions, and, above all, a great in¬ 
fluence over the rural populations—an influ¬ 
ence that has been strengthened by the 
recent panic caused by the numerous con¬ 
versions to Catholicism. . 

The English People are much more Pro¬ 
testant than the clergy, and we might say 
that it is the people who encourage the 
clergy in their revolt against the unity of 
the Roman Church. Here the common axiom 
that extremes meet has received a complete 
refutation. Anglicanism is, of all Pro¬ 
testant sects, that which approaches nearest 
to Catholicism; and it is that also which has 

* I give in round numbers the sums stated in the Parlia¬ 
mentary returns, cited by M. Lorain, * On Popular Education in 
England,’ 1855. 



200 


ARCHITECTURAL REVIVAL. Sect. XII. 


given Catholicism the most converts, while 
we see as yet no symptom of reconciliation, 
or even of impartial indifference, among the 
Dissenters. Some impatient spirits amongst 
us call loudly for the overthrow of the An¬ 
glican Church, and in that fall they anticipate 
the triumph of Catholicism in England. 
They are under a complete delusion. The 
Protestant enemies of the Established Church 
reproach her continually for being a hot¬ 
bed for Catholics, and her fall would only 
serve to enlarge the ranks, already too full, 
of the Rationalists and Socinians. 

The architectural revival which has burst 
forth with so much energy among the Angli¬ 
can clergy, is also a symptom of strength and 
ot life that it would be useless to underrate. 
It may have degenerated with some young 
Puseyite ministers into puerile affectations. 
These are small evils, inseparably connected 
with all renovations and with all salutary 
changes; but it is not the less sure that it 
has opened a door to the study of ecclesias¬ 
tical antiquity—that it has led many on the 
road to Unity, and that in those who have 


Sect. XII. ARCHITECTURAL REVIVAL. 201 

stopped half-way it lias engendered a pro¬ 
found respect for religious traditions, and 
consequently for Catliolic authority. 

Nothing can be more curious nor more 
meritorious than the efforts made hy the 
Anglican clergy to restore to their cathedrals, 
the collegiate and abbey churches, the splen¬ 
dour of Catholic times. We must mention 
as a pattern the cathedral of Ely, a mar¬ 
vellous monument of monastic genius, re¬ 
paired by the care of Dr. Peacock, Dean of 
the Anglican chapter, with as much skill as 
splendour. 

In seeing those old churches—so large, so 
fine in their primitive beauty, and borrowing 
a new beauty from the painted glass and sculp¬ 
ture added to them by a pious munificence, 
we might fancy them ready to receive, in all 
its integrity, the Divine truth of which they 
possess but such a small portion. 

This laudable and scrupulous respect of the 
English for ecclesiastical antiquities some¬ 
times produces the strangest contrasts. Thus, 
in going on his pilgrimage to the profaned 
tomb of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the 



202 


ZEAL OF ANGLICAN CLERGY Sect. XII. 


Catholic sees a neo-Gothio chair, which he is 
told is the present Archbishop’s throne, and 
close by the magnificent sepulchre of a cardi¬ 
nal of the fifteenth century, with an epitaph 
giving him all his titles, and where the words 
Sacrosanctce Romance Ecclesice come as it were 
to shame the usurped throne of the schismatic 
primate. 

We must, however, admire sincerely the 
zeal and the munificence of the Anglican 
priests and laymen, for the adornment and 
the restoration of what they deem the house 
of God. We must felicitate them that, with 
their usual happy inconsistency, they do not 
perceive that the decoration so profusely re¬ 
produced on Catholic architecture and sculp¬ 
ture, rests most entirely on the doctrine of 
the real presence and of the invocation of 
saints—the tenets that official Anglicanism 
most rigorously proscribes, in spite of the 
protestations and the interpretations of the 
Anglo-Catholic school. 

But, however, they do more than restore 
and adorn—they build. Although the An¬ 
glican clergy have the exclusive possession of 



Sect. XII. FOR CHURCH RESTORATION. 


203 


the vast number of churches, formerly built 
by the Catholics, a number no revolution 
ever had the power to decrease, the want 
of church accommodation is one of the great 
complaints of the time ; although the last 
official return of the committee appointed to 
survey the erection of new churches states 
the number of those built in the last thirty- 
five years at six hundred , and these of the 
Anglican Church alone, and built by volun¬ 
tary subscriptions, with a very small help 
from the Government. These new churches 
contain 584,000 sittings, of which 350,000 
are made free in perpetuity, and reserved for 
the poor. It is not much compared with the 
immense increase of population in the work¬ 
ing classes ; but it is better than nothing, 
and a religion that builds is not on the de¬ 
cline. 

We must also mention, as another sign of 
life, the efforts made by the Anglicans to 
shake off the yoke of temporal power, in¬ 
flicted on them and accepted by Henry YIII. 
and Elizabeth, and of which they now and 
then are made to feel the weight. The Con- 


204 


CONVOCATION. 


Sect. Nil. 


vocation is a sort of spiritual parliament, ana¬ 
logous to our former assemblies of the clergy. 
It is composed of two chambers—one of the 
bishops, the other the delegates of the inferior 
clergy. It dates from the Catholic times, 
when it used to vote taxes on the Clergy. 
It had fallen practically into disuse, but has 
for the last four years met again, no longer 
for form’s sake, but to discuss serious ques¬ 
tions, and more especially to claim from the 
Crown a little more self-government. Parlia¬ 
ment, however, obliges the Crown to give 
civil refusals. It fancies perhaps that any 
emancipation of the official Church would 
tend to develope in itself the elements which 
would lead towards the Catholic Unity. 


Sect. XIII. EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. 


205 


SECTION XIII. 

THE EFFORTS OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AGAINST THE 

DANGER. 

No one assuredly, even amongst her most 
devoted children, can believe that the Angli¬ 
can Church, supposing her to he completely 
emancipated from any temporal authority, 
could alone have the strength to struggle 
against the social difficulties which threaten 
England. She may, however, have her 
share, and a considerable share, in the double 
work of resistance and transformation which 
is to save this great people. Far from ex¬ 
cluding the Church, all the powerful social 
influences invite her to take a part in the 
great attempt. 

But it is by the activity, the foresight, and 
the energy which always characterise the 
influential classes, that this saving work must 
be performed. 

At the outset of any crisis on which a coun- 


206 EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. Sect. XIII. 

try is about to enter, the first condition of sue- 
cess is to know the danger, to study it, and 
look it in the face; and this is precisely what 
is done in England. No one is under any 
delusion as to the danger presented on the one 
hand from the rapid progress of democratic 
ideas, through a press that nothing can re¬ 
strain, and on the other by the prodigious 
increase of the working population in the 
manufacturing districts, which is either in¬ 
different or hostile to all religious influence— 
a population that has grown with the in¬ 
creased production of the coal mines, beyond 
all the proportions of old English society. 
The classes on whom devolve the great poli¬ 
tical interests of the country have nobly met 
the difficulty. They have not declined the 
responsibility of their social position, nor the 
obligations which bind them to the masses, 
whose pressure envelopes and overpowers 
them. They try to provide, in the first in¬ 
stance, for the danger that presses most, by 
the extension of popular education, under the 
inspiration of religion, and by innumerable 
institutions, wisely and liberally founded and 



Sect. XIII. EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. 


207 


supported to extend and consolidate the ma¬ 
terial welfare and the moral progress of the 
working men and their families. 

At every step we find proofs of the serious 
efforts and generous sacrifices which are made 
to advance this general good. 

Amongst the number of institutions which 
might be mentioned, I must take notice of 
that admirable Society for the Amelioration of 
the Working Classes , of which the Earl of 
Shaftesbury is President, which, with the 
Metropolitan Association for the Amelioration 
of the Dwellings of the Working Classes , ob¬ 
tained, in 1851, an act of parliament for the 
better regulation of the lodgings of the poor. 
They have besides created at their own ex¬ 
pense a vast number of model establishments, 
sought after with eagerness by the workmen, 
and where it is asserted the mortality, which 
generally in London is twenty-five in a 
thousand, has been reduced to eight in a 
thousand.* 


* Henry Roberts, On the Physical Condition of the Working 
Classes , p. 16. 1855. 



208 EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. Sect. XIII. 

Every intelligent traveller should make it 
a point to visit carefully these model houses, 
and compare them with the old lodging- 
houses, which have been, however, consider¬ 
ably improved since the law we have just 
mentioned. 

In a still higher sphere, and to attain a 
just idea of the practical and spontaneous 
devotion with which those privileged by for¬ 
tune and education labour to improve the 
moral and social condition, and promote the 
intellectual progress of the working popula¬ 
tion, one must visit the school for adult 
workmen, founded in London by subscrip¬ 
tions, directed with a pious and disinterested 
zeal by the Rev. Mr. Maurice, and where 
Mr. Ruskin, the most remarkable writer of 
the day on questions of art, gives gratuitous 
lectures. We should there learn the most 
curious details on the tendencies of the men 
who frequent that school; we should see 
some of them ask of their own accord to be 
taught Latin as well as French, and we 
should hear with what docility they receive 
the first instructions in the religion that they 


Sect. XIII. EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. 


209 


know nothing of, and what profound and 
almost excessive gratitude they feel towards 
those who give themselves any trouble on 
their account. 

We shall also understand the generosity 
which has caused the surplus of the consider¬ 
able sums collected at the entrance of the 
Crystal Palace in 1851, to be spent in the 
formation of forty schools of drawing for the 
workmen of the provincial towns, founded by 
the Association of which the Crystal Palace 
itself had been entirely the spontaneous work. 

In another suburb of London, and among 
so many institutions worthy of admiration 
and envy, we must mention also the school 
for the five hundred children of the two sexes 
employed in the candle manufactory of 
Messrs. Price and Co. The origin of this 
establishment, in 1848, was the spontaneous 
act of half-a-dozen little boys, who began to 
keep a mutual school among them in the 
corner of a workshop, without the suggestion 
or intervention of any one. By-and-by the 
other children gradually joined them, and 
during several months the school was suc- 

p 


210 


EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. Sect. XIII. 


cessfully conducted and extended by a com¬ 
mittee cliosen by tlie children themselves. So 
innate is the principle of self-government in 
this noble race. Now the partners of the 
company have taken this school in hand, and 
under the management of Mr. James Wilson, 
it has become a pattern of tender and intelli¬ 
gent solicitude for the minds and souls of 
the workmen’s children.* 

In a country where such facts are of daily 
and universal occurrence, who will dare to 
say that the rich have no care of the poor, 
that society has no compassion, that it hides 
an internal disease that gnaws it, or that it 
blinds itself to the necessity of looking out 
for a remedy ? 


* Special Report by the Directors to the Proprietors of Price’s 
Patent Candle Company , March 24, 1852. I find this passage 
in a very touching and curious letter of Mr. Wilson’s “ The 
manufacturers who get into Parliament to legislate on education 
appear to me as if the father of a family, giving himself up to 
parish business, were to employ a churchwarden and beadle to 

superintend the affairs of his own family.Public effort 

can never supply the place of private effort. The intervention of 
the State, however strong and powerful, can never rival that of 
the individual in the delicate task of forming human minds, and 
ot developing the moral character of human beings at the most 
impressionable time of their lives.” 



Sect. Kill. EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. 


211 


Very far from seeing, as some pretend to 
do, in the upper orders, a permanent con¬ 
spiracy against the suffering classes, we may 
affirm that there is a constant and sincere 
effort to ameliorate their condition. Public 
charity now goes far beyond any former 
limits; and it has been said with truth, that 
it is such national sacrifices that are the best 
evidence of national virtue. 

From all this we may conclude that the 
directing classes in England are infinitely 
superior to what they were a hundred years 
ago, or perhaps at any period of their history. 
They are more moral, wiser, and more en¬ 
lightened than they formerly were. That 
does not mean that they are yet sufficiently 
so, that there is no room for further improve¬ 
ment ; but it proves that they are animated 
by a spirit of devotion and charity which is 
every day on the advance. 

We do not mean to conclude that the 
English Aristocracy is safe in its position. 
God, to humble the pride of the conqueror, 
and to console the afflictions of the van¬ 
quished, and to inculcate that indispensable 

p 2 


212 


EFFORTS AGAINST DANGER. Sect. XIII. 


precept, “ Here we have no continuing city, 
but we seek one to come,” ( Heb . xiii. 14)— 
God, I say, sometimes permits that powers of 
this world should fail and disappear at the 
moment when they seem most to deserve to 
be preserved. The French monarchy fell 
under the best of the Kings who had reigned 
since Saint Louis—under that King who the 
most thoroughly loved the people in whose 
name he was murdered. 

History is but a long chronicle of the tri¬ 
umphs of violence, of falsehood, of ingrati¬ 
tude, and of egotism ; hut justice and reason, 
devotion and honour do not the less vindicate 
their value and their rights. It is precisely 
the uncertainty of their success here below 
which constitutes their merit and their glory. 



Sect. XIY. WILL ENGLAND REMAIN FREE? 213 


Rf 07G;i 07/ •mil f 1. = •;>•■ 

SECTION XIV. 

WILL ENGLAND DEMOCRATIZED REMAIN FREE? 

It is time to conclude. After these prolonged 
excursions in too vast a career, let us return 
to the problem we began with ; let us sup¬ 
pose that a sudden hurricane has swept away 
all that we have been admiring and praising. 
Suppose all the aristocratic institutions of 
England annihilated—the Peerage destroyed 
—the House of Commons overthrown by uni¬ 
versal suffrage—the Universities and public 
schools suppressed — Old England buried 
under a chaos of ruins, as France was in 
1789 ; hut, lastly, supposing that England 
has, like France, survived such a catastrophe, 
let us on these premises ask ourselves if Eng¬ 
land, though she should survive it, will still 
remain free. 

Thus put, this question- concerns and in¬ 
terests all the modern nations. All have lost, 



214 


DECLINE OF ARISTOCRACY. Sect. NIV. 


or are losing, the last remnants of their aris¬ 
tocratic institutions, traditions, and manners ; 
and aristocracy, once cut down, can no more 
be raised again than a forest of oaks after it 
has been grubbed and ploughed. But are we 
doomed to pass all our future life without 
safety or shelter because the residence of our 
youth has disappeared ? Must we never plant 
again, never expect to see another growth 
because we can never again see the same 
groves that our fathers have destroyed ? Must 
we, as a certain school of sophists teaches us, 
live without liberty because we have no longer 
an aristocracy to ensure it ? Must we allow 
ourselves to be duped by those belated pane¬ 
gyrists who have never known nor understood 
the value of what they praise till after they 
have destroyed it ? In the minds of all states¬ 
men, and indeed of every thinking man in 
France, the cause of the aristocracy was won 
from the moment that aristocracy was dead 
and buried ; but many of those who now praise 
it, only do so on one imperative condition, 
namely, that Liberty, of which Aristocracy 
was the companion and the guarantee, shall 


Sect. XIV. GUARANTEES FOR THE FUTURE. 215 


be dead also, and that neither one nor the 
other shall ever be brought to life again. But 
shall we accept the funeral oration pronounced 
over the twin-sisters as a political gospel for 
the future ? Must we admit with them that 
the sacrifice of our liberal convictions is the 
only security for the maintenance of modern 
society—that its security, its prosperity, even 
its existence are depending on this condition*— 
and that to live in peace we must renounce 
that liberty which was the faith, and which 
remains, where it does remain, the sole honour 
of modern humanity —et propter vitam vivendi 
perdere causas ? 

Let us say boldly that this is not the case; 
it will never be so for England, never for 
the Anglo-Saxon race. We have for a gua¬ 
rantee and surety against such a calamity the 
great people that, sprung from the English 
stock, has created a new nation in the New 
World. One must be blind not to see the 
vices, the dangers, the passions which trouble 
and threaten the republic of the United States, 
to forget the inexcusable stain of slavery, and 
the wild attempts of the Know-notliings; but 



216 


COLONIES. 


Sect. XIV. 


one must be more than blind not to see that, 
notwithstanding all this, the republic of the 
United States has in the midst of her unli¬ 
mited, her excessive liberty, all the conditions 
required for strength and greatness, and all 
the seeds of a gigantic destiny. 

We find, moreover, some safeguards for 
England in a narrower but still an extensive 
sphere—in the new British colonies, and the 
immense development of liberty and of life 
that Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, and 
Canada present. There is no aristocracy there, 
no tradition, no historical prestige , no heredi¬ 
tary influence, no usages and manners super- 
stitiously respected. There the Anglo-Saxon 
race has to struggle with the untried, the 
unknown, the infinite. It brings to this 
struggle only its natural gifts and the virtues 
acquired by a long practice of liberty, which 
gifts and virtues will remain with it even 
though the storm of victorious democracy 
should drive it on the dark ocean of futurity 
like a ship from her anchors. 

In these new-born societies the Anglo- 


Sect. XIV. 


COLONIES. 


217 


Saxon race, the vigorous scions of the old 
English stock, replanted in a new soil, al¬ 
ready shows the combination of independ¬ 
ence and discipline, of energy and order, of 
enterprise and perseverance, of liberty and 
loyalty which characterises all the course of 
its European history. No serious symptom of 
dissatisfaction is shown towards the mother- 
country, which holds the reins of metropolitan 
authority with the most prudent moderation. 
Thus is verified the noble prediction of 
Burke, that he prematurely applied to the 
insurrection of the United States, hut which 
seems to have since become the guiding prin¬ 
ciple of the colonial policy of England :— 

“ As long as you have the wisdom to keep 
the sovereign authority of this country as the 
sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple conse¬ 
crated to our common faith, wherever the 
chosen race and sons of England worship 
freedom, they will turn their faces towards 

you.Slavery they can have anywhere. 

It is a weed that grows in every soil; they 
may have it from Spain, they may have it 



218 


INDIA. 


Sect. XIV. 


from Prussia.Freedom they can have 

from none hut you.” * 

In other places, and on the greatest theatre 
which, as yet, has been opened to the intelli¬ 
gence and the activity of the Eurojiean races, 
in India, on both hanks of the Ganges, we see 
with what splendour the genius of English 
colonisation shines ; and for every man who 
loves his fellow-man, who believes in the 
legitimate progress of the human race, who 
welcomes the increasing happiness of the 
many, what a consoling and marvellous spec¬ 
tacle is that of the English Indian dominion ! 
Its history in those regions is certainly not 
without stain ; it required Warren Hastings’ 
trial and the eloquence of Burke and Sheridan 


* Speech on Conciliation with America , March 22, 1775._ 

Burke’s Works, iii. 124. 

It is in the same speech that, to describe the pacification of 
Wales when England had communicated to it the benefits of 
her constitution, Burke made so happy an application of Horace’s 
beautiful lines :— 

“ Simul alba nautis 
Stella refulsit, 

Defluit saxis agitatus humor, 

Concidunt venti, fugiuntque nubes 
Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto 
Unda recumbit.” 



Sect. XIV. 


INDIA. 


219 


to render it impossible for English governors 
to attempt to imitate the exactions and the 
oppressions of the former masters of the 
country. 

The immoderate egotism of British com¬ 
merce has imposed on the native populations, 
in some instances, restrictions on industry 
that an honest application of the principles 
of free trade will necessarily remove ; and, in 
some cases, a forced cultivation, like that of 
opium, which is a shame to England, and a 
scourge to China. 

But everything considered, and allowing 
a large amount of evil, we may boldly affirm 
that history gives no example of a conquest 
so completely turned to the good of the van¬ 
quished. Let us think of the frightful con¬ 
dition of those weak and industrious races 
exposed without defence for so many centuries 
to the cruelty, the rapacity, the outrages of 
the Moguls, the Afghans, the Mahrattas, and 
compare their state then with that of the one 
hundred and fifty millions of souls who live 
now in peace under the laws and the flag of 
England. They are governed by a handful 


220 


INDIA. 


Sect. XIV. 


of foreigners—foreigners by origin, by man¬ 
ners, by religion, but belonging by the ties of 
justice and humanity to the populations that 
they govern, and that they have saved from 
the worst excesses of oppression and iniquity. 
These foreigners have not even feared to put 
arms in the hands of the Natives, for it is 
known that these form nine-tenths of the im¬ 
mense army of the East India Company. But 
what have they to fear ? None of these Hindoos 
is ignorant that a king of their own country 
would not govern them so well, would not 
watch with the same solicitude over their in¬ 
terests, their wants, their rights. A few local 
or passing insurrections, like that of the 
Santals, make no change in this general state 

of affairs. For half a centurv the more 

*/ 

northern provinces have alone been the seat 
of war; all the rest of this colossal empire 
has presented the aspect of an immense 
school, where wise and good men come from 
a far-distant land to implant, without vio¬ 
lence, and by the mere expansive power of 
good, in the heart of the East the arts and 
the laws, the sincere and simple manners of 


Sect. XIV. 


INDIA. 


221 


the West. Pursuing with a prudent and slow 
but sure progress the abolition of the san¬ 
guinary rites of idolatry,* of the immolation 
of widows, human sacrifices, infanticide; in¬ 
suring to the Christian missionaries the free¬ 
dom of truth, and substituting for the extor¬ 
tions of Asiatic f fiscality moderation and 


* We must mention here an instance amongst a thousand of 
the credulity of those who allow themselves to be duped by the 
mystifications that the English press delights in, and by which 
it succeeds too often in deceiving the public of the two worlds. 
Punch , the English Charivari , having one day announced that 
a manufacturer at Birmingham had just manufactured a cargo 
of idols to be despatched to Hindostan, some American papers 
circulated the joke. From these it found its way to some French 
religious journals, which took it seriously ; and it has been the 
theme of many invectives against the abominable English cupidity 
which makes a speculation of idolatry. 

t It has been lately discovered that in several remote regions 
of this immense peninsula some inferior agents of the revenue 
department, natives by birth, and faithful to the traditions of the 
abominable despotism which formerly weighed so heavily on all 
Hindostan, have had recourse to torture to force the contributors 
to pay the arrears of taxes. The enemies of all liberty amongst 
us have immediately made this a new score of invectives against 
England. They have forgotten to add that, differently from the 
practice of their own system of government, this crime has, as 
soon as known, been denounced to public indignation by the 
thousand voices of the press: that as soon as Parliament had 
cognizance of the fact an inquiry was ordered, which took place 
immediately ; that no one has attempted to defend or deny it; 
and that the repression of the enormity has been as prompt as sure. 

It 



222 


INDIA. 


Sect. XIY. 


regularity in taxes, trial by jury for arbitrary 
sentences, and finally, by establishing gradu¬ 
ally the legal equality of the English and the 
Hindoos, and opening to the latter free access 
to schools, to employments, to dignities, and 
thus preparing the elements of a great future 
federation, which will probably be the cradle 
of an incalculable renovation of all Asia. 

The only feeling of regret that a French¬ 
man may have at the sight of so great and 
so deserved a prosperity, is that France very 
narrowly missed the glory of civilising these 
countries, and that, had it not been for the 
miserable policy of the absolute monarchy of 
Louis XY. and the follies of the Revolution, 
the glory of Dupleix and Suffren might 
have eclipsed that of Clive and of Wellesley. 


It may be affirmed without fear, that with a few rare exceptions, 
hardly perceptible in an empire of 150 millions of souls, rapine 
and oppression have disappeared since Warren Hastings’s trial in 
1784; and no traces of it are found but in the tributary princi¬ 
palities, and those which are not altogether under the dominion 
of the East India Company. See on this subject Lord John 
Russell’s beautiful reflections, Memorials and Correspondence of 
Fox , p. 257. 




Sect. XIY. 


INDIA. 


223 


Perhaps the foolish officialities of our admi¬ 
nistration might have deferred or complicated 
the work of colonisation; but, on the other 
hand, the sympathetic nature of the French 
character would have more easily won the 
heart of the natives, and the influence of 
the Catholic religion, aided by French genius, 
would have renewed perhaps with still greater 
successes the too ephemeral wonders of the 
Portuguese dominion in Hindostan. 

Happily God has given France a magni¬ 
ficent indemnity in Africa, where all her 
mili tary genius has been refreshed, and where 
the blood of her bravest children has bap¬ 
tized the soil as French for ever. Algeria 
is the best of colonies for us. Of all those 
that we have been invading for the last cen¬ 
tury Algeria alone remains to us, as if to 
prove that the only legitimate and durable 
conquests are those made under the reign of 
liberty. 

But to return to India. Let it be well re¬ 
membered that the initiation of the East into 
the civilisation of the West is the work of 


224 


INDIA. 


Sect. XIV. 


the middle classes of England. The aristo¬ 
cracy, properly so called, has nothing to do 
with it. The aristocracy gives at most a few 
civil and military chiefs to the four Presi¬ 
dencies, and a few of its junior branches 
have inferior parts in the administration. 
But almost all the public functions, all the 
wheels of the great machinery, are in the 
hands of the middle class—that class which 
in England is on a gradual advance, and 
which would replace the old aristocracy, il it 
should be its fate to disappear. It has shown 
a capacity and a morality which honour it, 
and which form a striking contrast to the 
sad results of Spanish colonisation in the total 
destruction of the indigenous nations ot 
America. 

If, when transplanted into these distant 
regions, and deprived of all the conditions 
of success that short-sighted politicians con¬ 
sider as exceptional in the history of the 
world, this English race thus exhibits every¬ 
where an incontestable superiority and so¬ 
lidity, it gives us a right to reckon on a 
persevering exertion of the same qualities on 



Sect. XIV. ANGLO-SAXON SUPERIORITY. 


225 


their native soil, and in defence of their 
national existence, if it can be supposed Eng¬ 
land is predestined to anything like the same 
series of trials and misfortunes which have 
brought France into her present condition. 


226 


EESPECT FOE OPINION. 


Sect. XY. 


SECTION XV. 

QUALITIES WHICH MAY GUAEANTEE TO ENGLAND 
HEE LIBEETY INDEPENDENTLY OF HEE AEISTO- 
CEACY. 

/ 

Of all the qualities which constitute the 
social strength of this privileged race, the 
rarest and the most essential to the political 
life of a free nation is the respect for the 
opinions of others. From this arise the sin¬ 
cerity that characterises the public discussions 
and the guarantee of the rights of minorities, 
which distinguish the political acts of modern 
England. 

It is, however, hut lately, and under the 
beneficial pressure of her habits of discussion 
and of publicity, that England has arrived to 
this high degree of justice and of impar¬ 
tiality. It is therefore not an exclusive 
appanage of the Anglo-Saxon race,—it is the 
consequence of the laws and the liberties that 
that race has known how to preserve. It is 


Sect. XV. 


RESPECT FOR OPINION. 


227 


its most recently acquired virtue, but it is 
also the noblest and the most enviable. The 
majority, which has for the moment the 
superiority, does not make the same use of 
its power that it formerly did; but the 
minority produces and records its protes¬ 
tations, to prove that it has reason on 
its side; and to try to become in its turn 
the majority. Minorities, in fact, require 
freedom more than majorities. Under all 
systems, majorities are almost always sure 
to carry their object. Absolute power may 
be established by surprise, but it cannot 
last without the sympathy and the support 
of the majority of those who obey. In Eng¬ 
land the majority is for liberty, because it 
feels that at any moment it may become a 
minority in its turn ; and whatever may be 
the transformation now in progress—what¬ 
ever may be in store for this people, there 
is every reason to suppose that this salutary 
disposition will continue to animate it. 


From this arises the desire of hearing and 
discussing all the sides of a question—of 
allowing freedom of speech to all interests, 

o 2 


228 


ECCLESIASTICAL TITLES BILL. Sect. XV. 


to all parties, and to respect the opinions thus 
expressed, with a tolerance which sometimes 
seems to degenerate into accomplicity. This 
is what the English call fair play in their 
political language, impregnated as it is with 
the images and recollections of the pleasures 
of their youth. 

None amongst us can forget the calm and 
intrepid courage displayed by Lord Aber¬ 
deen, by Sir James Graham, and Mr. Glad¬ 
stone, in 1851, in defending the religious 
liberty of the Catholics against the Ecclesi¬ 
astical Titles Bill. They were then running 
the risk of losing for ever their great politi¬ 
cal existence, so much was the popular and 
parliamentary passion excited by the re¬ 
establishment of the episcopal hierarchy; 
nevertheless, a year later they were all three 
called to fill the most important situations in 
the coalition ministry. 

Whoever has heard Mr. Gladstone’s me¬ 
morable speech against the prolongation of 
the war, on the 24th of May last, might have 
believed that the majority, or at least a very 
considerable portion of the members of the 


Sect. XV. TOLERANCE OF OPPOSITION. 229 

House of Commons was of his opinion—so 
great was the attention—so profound the 
silence with which he was heard; yet there 
were no more than thirty members out of five 
hundred who agreed with him; and public 
opinion, as well as the whole press, were 
unanimous against his conclusions. It was 
the same when Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright 
explained their theory about peace. We 
have. seen the much lamented Mr. Lucas, 
although doubly unpopular in the House, 
both as a convert to Catholicism, and as the 
representative of the warmest opinions of the 
Irish party , make himself heard with respect 
and attention.* 

Those who have seen our political assem¬ 
blies, more especially those who have had to 
struggle against the excessive or simultane¬ 
ous intolerance of the majorities and the 


* In the affair of the Madiai (15th May, 1851) he had the 
honour to discomfit Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, 
not in vindicating for the Catholic governments the rights and 
the privileges of persecuting error, but in giving a picture of 
the persecution and the violences perpetrated by the Protestant 
governments, encouraged by these two noble lords. Even the 
Times has done justice to the superiority of Mr. Lucas. 




230 


TOLERANCE OF OPPOSITION. Sect. XV. 


minorities, are better able to appreciate the 
benefits of such proceedings. 

This is because the English people, who 
have an instinctive admiration of civil cou¬ 
rage, recognises and admires that virtue in 
any man who dares to resist, even when 
alone, the ascendency of popular ideas, and 
the current of public opinion. Even when his 
passions and prejudices are the most directly 
contradicted, an Englishman is satisfied with 
the weakness and the want of power of his 
opponents; and far from stopping their 
mouths, he feels that the resolution and the 
tenacity of such energetic adversaries are an 
additional glory and strength to the national 
character. It seems, in truth, as if there is 
nothing more anti-democratic than these in¬ 
dividual resistances to the will of the mass. 
There are no more traces of it in the republic 
of the United States than in the absolute 
monarchies of Europe. In the democracies, 
the boldness of him who opposes the general 
opinion, is considered as an offence against 
equality—as the ne plus ultra of the abuse of 
privilege. It is, in fact, the height of aris- 


Sect. XV. 


POPULARITY. 


231 


tocracy to dare so to hold out against the 
idol of the day, to strive against the precipi¬ 
tous torrent, and to stand alone and erect, 
when all are bowing down, hiding their obse¬ 
quious—their cowardly heads. But nothing 
prevents this energy of an invincible con¬ 
science from displaying itself in a Christian 
and sincerely liberal democracy. Besides, it 
is such a general and deep-rooted habit in 
the English, so identical with the traditions 
of their general and local life, that, according 
to all probabilities, it will, to the honour of 
the English race, survive any revolution, and 
will co-exist with all the new forms of politi¬ 
cal life. 

This spirit of justice and sincerity, of 
which the English are proud in their poli¬ 
tical system at home, produces another effect, 
which is not without its importance. 

It has been said, with too much reason, 
that in France popularities are fugacious, and 
unpopularities implacable. Such is not the 
case on the other side of the Channel. Popu¬ 
larity is there as it is everywhere, ephemeral 
and volatile; but nobody is condemned to a 


() Q tl 


PUBLIC MEX. 


Sect. XV. 


perpetual unpopularity. Men have been seen 
who, after having been unpopular for many 
years, have conquered in one day general 
esteem and public admiration. A gallant 
action in time of war—a clever or opportune 
speech—an act of courage, of charity, have 
restored to many persons whose names might 
be mentioned, a position which appeared irre¬ 
vocably compromised or lost. 

This is a great encouragement to patience 
and perseverance, those two indispensable 
qualities for any political career. From this 
also, and from many other causes, arises the 
superior class of public men. Yes, although 
the golden age of parliamentary eloquence 
may be gone by—although the cycle of the 
great ministers, as well as that of the great 
orators, seems to be closed, English liberty 
has still an inexhaustible treasure in the 
character of its public men. They have 
undoubtedly prejudices, passions, numberless 
infirmities. They may be accused of narrow 
and exclusive views, of national, unbounded 
egotism, of pride obstinately blind, and of 
inconsistencies often ridiculous. All that is 





Sect. XV. CONSEQUENCES OF APOSTACY. 


233 


true; but what will never be seen amongst 
them is, that cynicism of apostacy, that abject 
worship of brute force, that obsequious adora¬ 
tion of success, that almost universal pros¬ 
tration of men’s minds, which have but too 
often dishonoured our contemporaneous his¬ 
tory. 

We do not deny that there may be in Eng¬ 
land some cases of apostacy and of corrup¬ 
tion : we deny their having been accepted 
and condoned by public opinion. Placed 
under the fire of an implacable publicity, 
brought up in the traditions of political 
honour, which renders baseness as impossible 
to the public man as cowardice to the soldier, 
the Englishman who feels in himself some 
low propensities, who meditates a sacrifice to 
fear or to lucre, of the convictions of his 
conscience and the antecedents of his life, 
makes up his mind to the event; he knows 
that he cannot parade his shame in the 
eyes of his fellow-citizens; he retires into 
some obscure, but lucrative corner of Gfovern- 
ment patronage, and is forgotten. There 
is not an example, now-a-days, in England, 


234 


PUBLIC OPINION. 


Sect. XV. 


of a man having increased by apostacy, or 
of having governed his country in making 
the sacrifice of his honour and morality to his 
ambition.* 

Here we must make an essential remark. 
In the Continental nations the feeling of 
honour, political and social, had its home and 
safeguard in the aristocratic spirit of the court, 
the army, and society in general. Now in 
the universal ruin of all aristocratic ideas and 
institutions, this flower, so liable to fade, is ex¬ 
posed without shelter to the mortal breath, be¬ 
coming every day more and more irresistible, 
of personal and pecuniary interest. And thus 
it is that in the countries where the secrecy of 
the Tribune and of the press guarantees im¬ 
punity to the weaknesses and apostacy of public 
men, the sentiment of honour becomes a super¬ 
annuated myth. On the contrary, wherever 
the parliamentary system exists, it creates 
again the reign of political delicacy; it exer¬ 
cises its dominion under a form often harsh 


K “ Wliat is to he feared is not so much the immorality of the 
great as the immorality leading to greatness.”—Tocqueville’s 
Democracy in America, vol. ii. chap. v. 



Sect. XV. REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM. 


235 


and undefined, but with an efficacious severity. 
The exaggerated but salutary susceptibilities 
of public opinion, constantly kept alive by 
the press, restrain in the heads of ambitious 
men, if not all, at least most, of the baser 
tendencies of human nature. Probity, faithful 
performance of engagements, disinterested¬ 
ness, become the first conditions of a public 
man’s success, and, thanks to this moral re¬ 
straint, without which there is no virtue 
either private or public, honour resumes its 
influence. 

If from individualities we come down to 
the masses—if we seek to recognise or to 
search the distinctive features of the English 
people in its political aspect, we shall find 
that the characteristic virtue of English so¬ 
ciety is effort—personal, prolonged, energetic, 
and spontaneous effort. 

We all know that effort is the first con¬ 
dition of merit and of virtue in temporal as 
well as spiritual concerns ; the system which 
most promotes effort is, then, that which most 
contributes to the morality as well as to the 
honour of a nation. It is in this view that 


236 


REPRESENTATIVE SYSTEM. 


Sect. XV. 


the representative system, well understood 
and applied, is the most important of all the 
distinctions of the Anglo-Saxon race. There 
no one thinks of requiring the Government to 
do all, to foresee all, to know all, to decide all, 
and of then repaying it with utter oblivion, or 
still more odious ingratitude, as soon as fortune 
ceases to favour it. There no Government 
has, as yet, ventured to substitute itself for 
the collective or individual action of its citi¬ 
zens, to compress everywhere the spontaneous 
strength, the responsible will of the commu¬ 
nity, to reduce and subject everything to its 
sole initiation, correction, authorisation, inter¬ 
vention, and personal interest. Far from 
giving way to these tendencies, to the uni¬ 
versal encroachment which forms the appa¬ 
rent strength but the real weakness of all the 
rulers to whom France has had successively 
to submit, the English Government is ex¬ 
tremely reluctant to meddle with what does 
not exclusively belong to the domain of poli¬ 
tics properly so called. It is often pushed 
into this path by the Democrats and Radicals, 


Sect. XV. CARE FOR THE GENERAL INTEREST. 237 

and by the superannuated blindness of some 
Liberals ; but it proceeds in it with very re¬ 
luctant and dilatory steps. 

Public opinion agrees with historical tra¬ 
dition in imposing on every English subject 
the right and the duty of working and caring 
for the general interest. At the great demon¬ 
stration for administrative reform which took 
place at Drury Lane, on the 13th of June 
last, the president of the meeting pronounced 
“ the public business of England is the private 
business of every Englishman.” There is 
nothing new in this. When we look sixty 
years back, at the time of the explosion of 
the revolutionary doctrines in England, we 
lind this passage in a letter of Lord Gren¬ 
ville, Secretary of State, and one of Pitt’s 
colleagues :— 

“ The hands of Government must be 
strengthened, if the country is to be saved; 
but, above all, the work must not be left to 
the hands of Government, but every man 
must put his shoulder to it, according to his 
rank and situation in life, or it will not be 


238 CARE FOR THE GENERAL INTEREST. Sect. XY. 


done.Our laws suppose magistrates 

and grand juries to do this duty, and if they 
do it not, I have little faith in its being done 
by a Government such as the constitution has 
made ours.”* 

This concourse of all to the common work 
is not only the basis of political life, but it is 
the fundamental basis of all social organis¬ 
ation. Labour, struggle, independent and 
spontaneous activity are visible everywhere. 
From this there necessarily results at first 
sight an appearance of confusion and of dis¬ 
order which strikes with astonishment those 
who come from countries where everything is 
arranged, classed, and ticketed according to 
the rules of that tiresome uniformity and 
minute solicitude of the public authorities 
which, while it saves men trouble by releasing 
them from all responsibility, destroys the prin¬ 
ciple of self-action — extinguishes zeal and 
enterprise—enervates the existing race of 
meu, and condemns them to, as it were a 


* Lord Grenville’s 
1*1 tli November, 17b_. 


Letter to the Marquis of 


Buckingham, 





Sect. XV. STABILITY OF ENGLISH SOCIETY. 239 


perpetual minority. Thus they can discover 
no other mode of emancipating themselves 
from the wardship of a Master than the 
throwing themselves into the wildest excesses 
of anarchy, and when they have got into 
that deplorable state, stunned, bewildered, ex¬ 
hausted, and terrified by that short and violent 
paroxysm, they become an easy prey to the 
first adventurer that presents himself, who 
audaciously puts on their necks the yoke they 
had just shaken off, to which they tamely 
submit en attendant that the demagogy should 
recover strength and courage to recommence 
its attack, and then it will find men without 
energy, without manliness, and, as it were, 
asleep in a chronic lethargy. 

To the English these alternations of vio¬ 
lence and exhaustion are unknown. They 
are always awake and stirring, and what a 
superabundance of energy, of activity, of in¬ 
telligence, and of productive strength do we 
see in all the directions of social, of political 
and industrial life ! Under those unquiet and 
complicated appearances there is a real sta¬ 
bility and regularity; order is everywhere 


240 


CHARITY. 


Sect. XV. 


maintained, everybody finds himself at last in 
his proper place, and employs himself in 
doing his own business. 

The first interests of all civilised nations—- 
Education, Charity, and Justice—take root 
and life in the inexhaustible reservoir of the 
independent spirit and spontaneous activity 
of twenty millions of Christian souls. 

The Englishman gives his money, his time, 
his name to a work of charity, or of public 
interest; he makes it his glory that the work 
thus promoted should be equal to the wants, 

- and in accordance with the progress, of gene¬ 
ral society; but to accomplish this, he never 
thinks of asking or of accepting the helping 
hand of the Government for that which he 
and his fathers have founded. He keeps 
his authority over these institutions, with the 
responsibility of them—his rights with his 
duties. He would faint at the sight of our 
cut-and-dry system of legal charity, directed, 
superintended, restricted, in fact pinioned and 
gagged , in which, since 1852, the members of 
the Bureaux de Bienfaisance through France 
are placed and displaced by the Prefets as 


Sect. XY. 


SELF-GOVEKNMENT. 


241 


are also all the administrators of hospitals, 
who formerly were elected. 

“ Supported by voluntary contributions ”— 
such is the proud and noble inscription that 
we read on most of the numerous hospitals 
and asylums which England provides for 
sickness, poverty, and misery. Even when 
the English Government has taken the initia¬ 
tive, the public always follows to take its ample 
share in the good work. “ Condidit Rex, 
Civium largitas per fecit” as it is written in 
the front of the immense hospital of Bedlam. 
It is well understood that these words, “ Sup¬ 
ported by voluntary subscriptions ,” imply also 
u governed by the authority of the subscribers .” 
It is the same principle everywhere—effort, 
personal and permanent sacrifices, and then 
the rights and the power arising from the 
sacrifice and the effort. As long as this prin¬ 
ciple shall remain in reverence and practice, 
England has nothing to fear; her glory and 
her virtue will assuredly survive the contagion 
of Continental servitude. 

It is thus that England escapes the 'greatest 
difficulty and the greatest danger of modern 


919 


SELF-GOVERNMENT. 


Sect. XV. 


society—the oppressive social uniformity of a 
despotic Government. There the variety of 
rights and the infinite diversity of individual 
opinions would strangle in its birth that fatal 
uniformity which is with us the offspring of 
bureaucracy —the mark and condition of servi¬ 
tude, and which, very far from being a gua¬ 
rantee of stability to nations or governments, 
has never saved these from the most sudden 
and most shameful overthrows. Still less has 
England known that detestable abuse of force 
created by the omnipotence of our modern 
Governments, whatever may be their origin 
or their name —Dictator or Assembly , Mon¬ 
archy or Republic. 

In the nations of this age a revolution or 
a conspiracy easily overthrows a Government, 
but it is too often only to substitute for the 
fallen power a new one, which is found to be 
quite as impatient of restraint as its prede¬ 
cessor was, and which arrogates to itself the 
right and the power of doing whatever it 
pleases, and succeeds for a time—so much have 
the most useful inventions of civilisation, 
and the happy gentleness of modern manners, 




Sect. XV. BARRIERS TO DOMINATION. 


243 


simplified the formerly laborious and hazard¬ 
ous task of despotism ! 

England, where all material improvements 
have found either their origin or their de¬ 
velopment, where philanthropy and comfort 
engage more of men’s thoughts than any¬ 
where else,—England, I say, has not yet 
known the humiliation of such mobility of 
opinions and of such a ready and universal 
submission to power. The ease and luxury 
of civil life have no more enervated their 
institutions than their characters. There 
nobody is all-powerful — neither the King, 
nor the law, nor the Lords, nor the mob. 
All that attempts to triumph and to dominate 
meets a barrier at every step. It may be a 
corporation, or an individual; it may be a 
written record, or a new custom; perhaps a 
remembrance, perhaps a prejudice ; but there 
is always a something to oppose encroachment 
and usurpation, and that something always 
finds auxiliaries in bodies of men or indi¬ 
viduals trained to independence, accustomed 
to resistance, and always ready to act in con¬ 
cert for the common cause. We may be sure 


244 


BARRIERS TO DOMINATION. 


Sect. NY. 


that oppression, whether imposed by law or 
exerted by power, will never reach the pro¬ 
portion that it takes in those countries where, 
all the citizens being reduced to an equal 
state of insignificance, there remains neither 
the will nor the means of organising any 
solid resistance even to the worst and most 
despotic measures. 


Sect. XVI. 


PUBLICITY. 


245 


SECTION XVI. 

PUBLICITY IN ENGLAND. 

Talking of the institutions and traditions of 
England, of those that we may not only envy, 
but might borrow for the benefit of our demo¬ 
cratic society, if we inquire closely what is 
the principal instrument of that social mecha¬ 
nism, at once so complicated and so substantial, 
and which guarantees the enjoyment of all 
those benefits—old or new—I am inclined to 
think that that instrument is publicity. Publi¬ 
city in England is at once immense, complete, 
and sincere. It has not been always thus,* 
but it is so now. Such a publicity cannot 
exist, of course, without the liberty of the 
press ; but the liberty of the press is not suffi¬ 
cient to secure it. We know it by experience. 

* We see in Wilberforce’s correspondence, that in the last 
years of the eighteenth century he had to complain of the 
alterations in his speeches by the newspapers of his opponents. 




246 


PUBLICITY. 


Sect. XYI. 


We have had the liberty of the press, hut we 
never have had publicity. 

In modern society, he who has publicity 
has everything. When the Venetian ambas¬ 
sador wished to give his republic a complete 
idea of the power of Cromwell in 1656, he 
wrote :—“ That man has turned out the House 
of Commons : il parle et il ment tout seul — 
he speaks and he lies alone.”'* 

In England, at present, publicity is really 
and sincerely the property of the public. In 
fact and in right the liberty of the press is 
unlimited; but it might be subjected to all 

the usefully restrictive measures which existed 

* 

under our parliamentary government, without 
producing any alteration in the sincerity and 
the frankness of the British press. English 
publicity is neither imposed, nor guaranteed, 
nor restrained by law. It is in the manners 
and in the public spirit of the nation. It 
arises out of a long practice of liberty. It has 
become the first necessity and the most impe- 


* Sagredo’s despatch, mentioned by M. Guizot (Histoire de la 
Republique d’Angleterre at de Cromwell, vol. ii. p. 240). 



Sect. XYI. JOURNALISM. 247 

rious liabit of the country. Do not expect 
from the English journalist either justice or 
moderation in his judgments ;—no—hut you 
will at least have the detailed and faithful 
account of the facts that he appreciates; the 
exact reproduction of the words spoken or 
written that he censures will always appear 
unmutilated in his columns by the side of his 
own articles, and the fair balance of truth is 
re-established. 

Let us take two examples where the contrast 
between France and England is the most 
striking. The reporting of parliamentary 
debates, when it was free with us, was liable 
to the most important mutilations and alter¬ 
ations, according to the opinions or the pas¬ 
sions of the journalist, though he pretended 
that he was giving his readers an exact 
account of the debate. I know of none but 
the Journal des Debats which made an honour¬ 
able exception to this rule. Who does not 
remember how the National used to season the 
speeches of its adversaries with imaginary 
interruptions and insults, forged in its own 
office ? These shameful tricks are unknown 


248 


JOURNALISM. 


Sect. XVI. 


to the English press. Whether yon take up 
a Liberal or a Conservative paper, you will 
almost always find a faithful report of the 
adverse arguments, and a fair account of the 
incidents of the most exciting debate. The 
reporters sometimes embellish the style of the 
speeches, but they would disdain to add or to 
retrench an essential word or idea. 

This severe probity, this admirable good 
faith is all the more meritorious and salu¬ 
tary because there never has been an official 
report of parliamentary discussions, nor any 
other means of rectifying or identifying the 
terms employed by the speakers, than an 
individual protest, addressed to the journals 
complained of; and these protests are rarely 
resorted to. 

The right of reply is not guaranteed in 
England by law, but it is always exercised 
with a scrupulous good faith. It has required 
more than one legislative disposition, and in¬ 
numerable judicial contestations, to insure 
its admittance among us. And Grod knows 
what difficulties, what squabbles, what mi¬ 
serable and fatiguing contestations it entails 


Sect. XVI. 


JOURNALISM. 


249 


when we are reduced to make use of it. 
It has been said with truth, the press with us 
is in a state that would better suit Barbary 
Powers. 

No one is ignorant of the mischief done by 
journalism to free institutions. It is so great 
that Liberty is almost reduced to say to the 
Press —Nec tecum , nec te sine , vivere possum. 
But it has not been sufficiently observed that 
its greatest abuses have survived the ruin of 
all our other safeguards. Since journalism 
has been itself shackled and relieved from the 
salutary counteraction of the Tribune , it has 
become more formidable than ever. The 
thousands of subscribers to our newspapers 
have never been more servilely tied to the 
wheels of their Master’s car; their ears and 
their understandings have never been more 
hermetically sealed to every sound but that of 
the one great bell which deafens them every 
morning for the rest of the day. The man 
who is not chained to one of the two or three 
predominant opinions has never had less chance 
than now of protesting against falsehood or 
obtaining reparation for calumny ; too happy 




250 


JOURNALISM. 


Sect. XVI. 


is he if his adversaries do not contrive to drag 
him into some snare or ambush, where they 
well know they will meet a third and all 
powerful party, who will speedily undertake 
to silence their victim. 

In England it is altogether different—the 
public looks upon itself as a permanent jury ; 
it must hear the pro and con. Every indivi¬ 
dual attacked or designated in a newspaper 
becomes immediately a party concerned in a 
trial—he uses and abuses the full freedom of 
defence. The newspaper is obliged out of re¬ 
spect to public opinion to take or to affect 
to take something of that impartial position 
which Anglo-Saxon equity imposes on the 
judges of the land, and which prohibits any 
attempt to browbeat or entrap a person on 
trial. Injustice, no doubt, often prevails; evil 
triumphs there as elsewhere ; but its victory, 
always contested, is never complete, never 
definitive. Every complaint finds an echo, 
every right a champion, every effort a fair 
field! 

Moreover, and above all dispute or personal 
prejudice, public interests as well as private 


Sect. XYI. 


PUBLICITY. 


251 


rights find the most efficacious safeguard in 
that universal and unlimited publicity. 

It is first the only effective mode of exerting 
the control of public opinion ; of rendering a 
traffic of consciences impossible ; of repressing 
some excesses of iniquity, of corruption, and of 
baseness, which would escape every other cor¬ 
rection. 

The blaze of daily discussion throws a light, 
not only on the surface of contested questions, 
but penetrates into the most obscure corners 
of prejudice and falsehood. 

In process of time abuse or injustice must 
yield to the energetic and reiterated remon¬ 
strances of the injured parties, or of honest 
and disinterested spectators. The resistance 
may be more or less long, the reparation more 
or less gradual; but the final result of all the 
discussions which have been for more than a 
century tried in the High Court of English 
Publicity, has always been favourable to 
liberty, to justice, and to humanity. 

I except, as I have done before, from this 
favourable judgment all that relates to the 
exterior policy of England, and to her rela- 


252 


THE ENGLISH PRESS 


Sect. XVI. 


tions with foreign States. Here the political, 
religious, and national partiality which dis¬ 
appears in the prolonged conflict of adverse 
parties in her interior discussions resumes 
all its force and all its fraud. But this might 
be considered as an exception that confirms 
the rule. The foreign parties, the principles, 
the States which have had the misfortune or 
the honour to attract the hostility or anta¬ 
gonism of the majority of the English people, 
are never represented in the English press. 
They are never permitted to enter into those 
prolonged polemics from which on other 
topics sparks of truth and justice are always 
sure to be elicited. 

On all questions of foreign policy the 
British public is easily made to believe quite 
as much nonsense, quite as many lies as our 
restricted publicity imposes on us on the 
questions which touch us more nearly. 

The great English newspapers keep, up, 
at a vast expense, in foreign capitals, corre¬ 
spondents, who are instructed to falsify and 
contradict facts and rights to whatever extent 
may be necessary to flatter and forward 


Sect. XYI. ON THE FRENCH ALLIANCE. 253 

British prejudices and interests; and they 
fulfil their task with complete success. 

Adulation becomes then as brutal as insult. 
The following fact will show that I cannot 
be justly accused of a blind Anglomanie. The 
question is the happy alliance between France 
and England, now sanctioned by victory, but 
which had been prepared, prophesied, praised, 
and popularised first by Madame de Stael, 
and since by all liberal statesmen in France. 
The English press, in order to pay its homage 
to this new friendship, fancies itself at liberty 
to forget or deny all the surprising improve¬ 
ments in religion, in public and private cha¬ 
rities, in civil liberty—the admirable results 
obtained by the genius of France in letters, 
in arts, in historical science, in the repres¬ 
sion of crime, in industry, and, in short, in all 
the various elements of public or private life 
during thirty-seven years of our political 
liberty. In the face of the contrast offered 
by the religious, intellectual, and social state 
of France in 1850 to that of France in 1812, 
I know but one French newspaper which 
would dare to say what an Englishman said in 



254 CATHOLIC CAUSE ADVANCED BY Sect. XVI. 

the Times of the 12th of November last — 
that “ he regretted that the Napoleonian era 
should have been interrupted by the dark 
episode of the Restoration , and the corrupt inter¬ 
medium of the Orleanist system .” 

Such are the abuses which may accompany 
the most precious of rights; such is the toll 
that passion and falsehood require from truth 
to allow it a free passage. We must not, 
however, allow the wounds inflicted by Eng¬ 
lish publicity on our creeds and affections to 
make us as unjust to it as it is to us, and 
deny that, on the whole, the good infinitely 
surpasses the evil. Let us record the con¬ 
solatory fact that religion and morals, which 
might be expected to run the greatest risks 
from an indefinite publicity, come triumphant 
out of that formidable trial. 

It is incontestable that the Catholic cause 
in particular has made a progress exactly 
proportioned to the development of the liberty 
of speech and of the press. 

The explosion of pride and anger which 
burst from the press against the re-establish¬ 
ment of the Catholic episcopal hierarchy has 


Sect. XVI. FREEDOM OF DISCUSSION. 


255 


produced none of the consequences which 
might have been anticipated. Among the 
Protestants the general tone of literature, 
periodical or not, is assuredly more Christian, 
more moral, more chaste, than it was a hun¬ 
dred years ago, before the degree of extension 
which publicity has now acquired. It may 
be affirmed that there is no country in the 
world where the press, however shackled or 
gagged, produces fewer offences against piety 
or morals; where the newspapers preserve 
more respect and decency towards the religion 
of the country. I am told that in the lowest 
grade of English society there is a number 
of licentious and impious writings in circula¬ 
tion. It is possible ; hut I affirm that these 
are not met with in any place where an 
honest man, very curious and not over 
scrupulous, may carry his investigations. I 
affirm that in no public place frequented by 
respectable persons, in no publication circu¬ 
lated amongst them, is there anything offen¬ 
sive to religion and morality which at all 
approaches to what is now distributed in 
France at fifty thousand copies a day, under 


256 


DISCUSSION RESTRICTED. 


Sect. XVI. 


that legislation which interdicts with an in¬ 
defatigable vigilance the slightest criticism of 
its official acts. 

What are we to conclude from this ?—That 
all errors must be equally repressed and com¬ 
pressed ? That is simply impossible. The 
most absolute powers would attempt it in vain, 
and the control that they do exercise perhaps 
increases the mischief. They repress political 
discussion; but political agitations seem in 
some degree to compensate for their notorious 
calamities by diverting depraved minds and 
vitiated tastes into revolts more flagrant but 
less guilty than those against the laws of 
decency, morality, and religion. It is re¬ 
markable that during the stormy and dan¬ 
gerous interval from 1848 to 1851, even the 
most reckless of our journals diminished some¬ 
thing of their rancour against morals and 
against Christianity. It is no longer so; and 
it is a matter more of regret than wonder. 
Restraint can never be so severe and absolute 
that the evil does not find some compensatory 
mode of issue. 

It remains to be seen whether the remedy 



Sect. XVI. 


DISCUSSION RESTRICTED. 


257 


lias been opportunely or sagaciously applied. 
Discussion and criticism have been prohibited 
where they would have produced little or no 
inconvenience, but they have been permitted 
when directed against the most sacred subjects. 
The Fathers of the late Council of the province 
of Bordeaux, held at La Rochelle, seem to 
believe that such was the case, for we read 
in their synodical letter of July, 1855, this 
remarkable passage :— 

“ If in these latter times the freedom of 
discussion has been restricted as to the powers 
of this world, does it not seem as if there had 
resulted a greater intensity of outrage against 
the Divine majesty ? ” 


s 


258 


ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 


Sect. XVII. 


SECTION XVII. 

ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 

A practical contrast will perhaps have more 
effect on some of my readers than the argu¬ 
ments with which I have tried to establish 
the intrinsic superiority of a political system 
founded on principles of liberty. 

Let us take a point of comparison in history 
which is clear of all theoretic prejudice, and 
of all national partiality. Let us put France 
aside, and compare England and Spain, such 
as they were after the Middle Ages and be¬ 
fore the Reformation—the one under Henry 
VII., the other under Charles V.—and let us 
then see their present condition. 

In 1510, England—exhausted by the War 
of the Roses, stripped of her possessions in 
France, not yet united with Scotland,, not yet 
enriched by colonies, not yet protected by 
a naval superiority — is hardly reckoned 




Sect. XYII. 


ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 


259 


amongst the important powers of Europe. 
In 1510, Spain—delivered, after seven cen¬ 
turies of struggles unparalleled in history, 
from the yoke of the Moors, constituted as a 
nation by Ferdinand and Isabella, mistress of 
a new world through Christopher Columbus, 
mistress of the Low Countries and of half 
of Italy—towers above all other Christian 
kingdoms. Ximenes governs her, St. Theresa 
is about to be born, Gonsalvo of Cordova 
fights her battles. She is on the verge of 
universal empire. 

Three centuries after, where are they ? 

In 1800, England—after her revolutions, 
her civil wars, her formidable struggle against 
the French Revolution—disputes with France 
the first place in the affairs of the world. 
She has no rival on the sea. She is the 
queen of commerce and of industry. She 
puts one foot on Gibraltar, the other on Malta. 
She has founded one empire in Asia, and in 
America another, which may one day eclipse 
her. She has advanced from greatness to 
greatness. She has produced in all the ranges 
of thought geniuses which have no superiors. 

s 2 





260 


ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 


Sect. XVII. 


Lastly, she is governed, as were Athens and 
Rome in their best days, by a race of men 
whose political wisdom is illustrated by incom¬ 
parable eloquence. 

In 1800, Spain—notwithstanding the vir¬ 
tues of her heroic population, so sober, so 
patient, so generous, so pious, so superior on 
all these points to the English race—Spain, 
preserved by her religious unity from an 
abundant source of discord and misfortune 
— Spain is nothing! All is gone, — insti¬ 
tutions, politics, civil guarantees, riches, 
credit, influence, navy, army, commerce, in¬ 
dustry, science, literature — all have simul¬ 
taneously vanished. From fall to fall, from 
despot to despot, from favourite to favourite, 
she has become nothing better than the prey 
of a Godoy. 

Pitt and Godoy : these two names sum up 
and explain the destinies and the differences 
of these two great Christian nations at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century. 

On the one hand life ! on the other death! 

How can we explain such a difference ? 

Protestants, and all those who look on 




Sect. XVII. 


ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 


261 


Luther’s Reformation as an era of progress, 
have a ready answer : Protestantism makes 
England’s greatness ; Catholicism causes 
Spain’s decline. 

To every Catholic worthy of that name, 
such an explanation is blasphemy. 

But we must account for so striking a con¬ 
trast. And how can we do it but in acknow¬ 
ledging that political liberty has alone been 
able to give to England her prodigious 
strength, and that despotism has in Spain 
infected, confiscated, destroyed the most pre¬ 
cious gifts that Grod ever gave a nation here 
below ? 

Our faith agrees thus with reason, with ex¬ 
perience, with historical evidence; for once 
more that liberty which is the glory and the 
strength of England is but the beneficial 
legacy constantly ameliorated of Catholic 
centuries. Spain, with her Cortes, her Fueros , 
her municipalities, had folly possessed it: she 
found in it strength to vanquish and to ex¬ 
pel the Moors, and the right to walk at the 
head of Christianity, till the fatal omnipotence 
and the stupid egotism of her kings con- 








262 


ENGLAND AND SPAIN. 


Sect. XVII. 


demned her to this rapid declension into 
insignificance. But when her last light was 
flickering, almost extinguished—when the 
iron hand of Napoleon placed on that dis¬ 
honoured throne one of his family—that chi¬ 
valrous nation resumes, by a sublime effort, 
a national attitude, and becomes her own mis¬ 
tress, and worthy of her ancestors. With 
the help of her old enemy, England, she, in 
her turn, breaks down the fragile fortunes of 
the conqueror of Europe. Political liberty 
plants its flag by the side of that of national 
independence on the impregnable walls of 
Cadiz, and, notwithstanding mistakes, follies, 
excesses, and even crimes, that must follow 
the new birth of a people so long misruled 
and misunderstood, her trial has been shorter 
and less shameful than that which degraded 
her from the hands of Isabella the Catholic 
to those of Godoy. 



Sect. XVIII. 


POLICY OF ENGLAND. 


263 


SECTION XVIII. 

CONCLUSION. 

It requires courage, I repeat, to do justice to 
England in our days, and to remain faithful 
to that admiration which the Liberals used to 
profess for her. In all that concerns her 
relations with foreign nations, her fickleness, 
her ingratitude, her strange enthusiasms, the 
harshness of her egotism, the abuse of her 
own strength, her odious usurpations on the 
weakness of others, her absolute contempt for 
justice when justice does not offer some in¬ 
terest to serve or some power which she is 
forced to respect,—all this is more than enough 
to excite against her the indignation of every 
upright and generous mind.* But, once more, 


* We may be allowed to reproduce here what we said before 
the revolution of February, on the contrast between the foreign 
policy of France and England:— 

“ We also have some dismal pages in our history, but I know 
nothing which resembles this odious tactic. W e have imposed the 







264 


SOCIAL ORGANISATION. Sect. XVIII. 


it is not her foreign policy, nor her alliances, 
nor her aggressions that I have attempted to 
examine, much less to defend or to praise. 

There we have nothing to learn, nothing 
to admire. 

But it is very different with her internal 
life and her social and political organisation. 
There all is worthy of study, and almost all 
worthy of envy. Thanks to institutions cre¬ 
ated in the middle ages, and that she alone 
in Europe has known how to preserve and 
bring to perfection. She alone also has been 
able to escape autocracy and anarchy, whilst 
all the nations of the Continent have fallen 


yoke of despotism upon foreign nations, but we began by under¬ 
going it and liking it ourselves. We have even carried anarchy 
and devastation at the points of our bayonets into many countries, 
but we began with being intoxicated ourselves by that delirium 
we were propagating abroad. What we have never done is to 
keep tor ourselves the benefits of order, of justice, and of liberty 
of social hierarchy, while we went abroad for hire to foment and 
to patronise disorder or tyranny. No, thank heaven! France 
has not to reproach herself with that blindness and egotism. My 
heait gladly pays her that homage, not in a narrow spirit of 
exclusive patriotism that I have always reproved, but in obedience 
to the feeling of morality, the feeling of outraged justice, which 
at last burst into light, and which forces from me this cry of an 
indignation too long suppressed.”—Speech of the 14th January, 
184b, in the House of Peers, on the affairs of Switzerland. 



Sect. XVIII. 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


265 


victims to one or the other, and sometimes 
to both. Will she he able to maintain that 
glorious privilege in the crisis she is going 
through now ? Will she still remain the in¬ 
violate asylum of liberty and of political good 
sense ? That is the question! I have not 
hesitated to answer it in the affirmative, be¬ 
cause I have not yet discovered any essential 
attempt against the principles, the habits, 
and the rules which have hitherto been her 
greatness and her liberty- Notwithstanding 
all the alarming symptoms I have mentioned, 
the defection of too great a number of states¬ 
men and of writers, who already lend a hand 
to the enemy, I hope she will not repudiate 
her past history. No ; that nation which has 
resisted Cromwell, and which has triumphed 
over Napoleon, will never be so weary of self- 
government as to abdicate her liberty, her 
conscience, and her honour into the hands of 
any man, however great, that the future can 
have in store for them. She will not substi¬ 
tute the silent reign of autocracy for the 
fruitful agitation of liberty, nor the stagnant 
vegetation of satisfied appetites for the strug- 








2G6 


POLITICAL STABILITY. Sect. XVIII. 


gles and salutary perils of a people who can 
walk alone. 

She will not give that satisfaction to the 
apostles of the new era, nor that lesson of 
despair to future generations. She will not 
accept equality in servitude in lieu of indi¬ 
vidual liberty. She will not sacrifice to a 
dream of envious levelling or a sickly longing 
after peace and security the independence, 
the dignity, the spontaneity of her noble 
nature. No ; in spite of many unfavourable 
symptoms that present themselves, England 
will never listen to the voice of those false 
prophets who teach nations to seek in their 
own humiliation a shelter against their own 
extravagance, to seek in silence an allevia¬ 
tion of their remorse, and to abdicate into 
the hands of an autocrat their honour, their 
conscience, and their responsibility. No; 
England will never understand or practise 
that new doctrine, which presents to the 
world, as an ideal of the past and of the 
future, a system where none can move but in 
fetters-—none rise but by crawling—where 
talent, virtue, thought, courage, count for 


Sect. XVIII. 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


267 


nothing unless they wear the livery of the 
government. 

In England, on the contrary, it is govern¬ 
ment that wears the livery of the People— 
the freedom of thought, of opinion, of party, 
the legitimate exercise and expression of 
which constitute the life and the rights of a 
free people. The individual value of men 
is not yet crushed under the heavy and im¬ 
placable level of masses of electors careless in 
their choice, and incompetent to judge. The 
sight of such a country is a repose to the eye 
fatigued at seeing all around the miserable 
triumphs of force legitimised by the blind 
miscalculation of Conservatives, by divisions 
not less blind of the Liberals, and by the 
cynical equality of the Democrats. In Eng¬ 
land, at least, every honest and generous 
heart has the consolation of belonging to a 
state of society founded on principles which 
uphold the dignity of our nature whilst they 
admit its incurable frailty and weaknesses. 

But that consolation would not be of long 
duration if England did not submit, in a 
just measure, to the transformations indis- 




268 


POLITICAL STABILITY. Sect. XVIII. 


pensable to the invincible march of time and 
of modern civilisation. She is now engaged 
in that great enterprise from which she will 
come ont with honour if she remains faithful 
to the lessons of her own history. Her 
powerful and intelligent aristocracy, unceas¬ 
ingly recruited by the most active elements 
of social life, will lead the way in this work, 
and identify itself with it. 

When, long ago, emerging from the middle 
age, the use of the cannon and the formation 
of permanent and plebeian armies took from 
the nobility its exclusive military duties, the 
English Aristocracy alone in Europe dis¬ 
covered and understood the civil and political 
mission which presented itself to them. 
Alone in Europe, it saved from the wreck 
ot the institutions which had been common to 
all Christianity tor five centuries all that was 
deserving of being saved. Alone it kept its 
rank at the head of the nation, and succeeded 
in doing so by bringing to the public defence 
and the exeicise ot public liberties its fortune, 
its influence, and its ancestral spirit of order 
and of perseverance. 


Sect. XVIII. POLITICAL STABILITY. 


269 


And now, again, it will see that society 
expects from it an analogous transformation, 
less exclusive, no doubt, but not less laborious 
nor less beneficial. The task of the old 
school politic is finished. The old parties are 
worn out. .Whigs and Tories have had their 
day. It would be in vain to attempt to 
galvanise these corpses. New interests and 
new problems have arisen. The great 
questions of humanity, of charity, of labour, 
of justice, are set to us by the hand of God ; 
they await from the intelligence and the 
devotion of the superior classes the solutions 
which already occupy all young, sagacious, 
and generous minds. 

The attentive study and sincere practice of 
the duties enjoined by property; the exten¬ 
sion of all the benefits of ancient order to 
the populations newly created by industry; 
the conciliation of their imperious and legi¬ 
timate exigencies with the maintenance of the 
guarantees of liberty and intelligence ; such 
is the task of those who have received from 
their fathers the magnificent inheritance of a 
constitution which supplies human activity 


270 POLITICAL STABILITY. Sect. XVIII. 

with the most energetic and most flexible 
instruments which it has ever been given to 
man to consecrate to his own good and to 
that of others. They will know how to make 
use of these instruments to keep this great 
people from that fatal declivity down which 
all other European nations are rapidly falling 
from a pretended equality to real servitude. 

If I am to believe all that I have seen and 
heard, English society will not he found un¬ 
equal to this task. -Future historians will be 
still able to felicitate England for having had 
“ at all times the most democratic aristocracy 
and the most aristocratic democracy that the 
world has ever known and if another 
Louis XI. should triumph on the Continent, 
another Comines may repeat the testimony 
that great politician gave four hundred years 
ago :—“ According to my opinion, in all the 
lordships of the world that I know, England 
is the one where public affairs are better 
managed, and where there is less- violence on 
the people.” f 


* Macaulay. 

f Speaking of the restraint on the King of England, of not 



Sect. XYIII. 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


271 


I anticipate another objection. I hear 
everywhere that the liberty and the pros¬ 
perity of England are owing to the peculiar 
character of her people, and that institutions 
analogous to hers cannot succeed but in a 
race endowed like hers with certain virtues 
which are not easily defined, but which every 
one agrees in saying are wanting in every 
other nation. I hold this opinion to be dia¬ 
metrically contrary to the evidence of history. 

The institutions of England have nothing 
special in themselves. They are hut an intel¬ 
ligent and progressive development of those 
enjoyed by all Europe during the middle 
ages—except the Byzantine Empire, always 
infected with the irremediable corruption of 
Csesarism. They were all grafted by Chris¬ 
tianity on the German stock from which we 
have all issued in different degrees. The 
English race has no greater admirer than I 
am; hut I do not know that it has a single 
virtue which was not given to all Christian 


undertaking; anything without the consent of his Parliament, 
Comines adds : “ Which is a very just and holy thing, and by 
which the kings are all the stronger and the better served.” 




272 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


Sect. XYIII. 


races, and that each of those races has dis¬ 
played in certain favourable circumstances. 
If we have all possessed in former times the 
institutions which make the strength and the 
glory of England, there is nothing in the 
nature of things to prevent our recovering 
and establishing for the future those which 
are the elements of the greatness of England. 

All nations are made to be improved—'ele¬ 
vated. Representative government is no doubt 
a long, laborious, and difficult education, but 
it is the most honourable and fruitful of all. 
The example of a nation which has gone 
through the despotism of the Tudors, which 
has survived the frauds and the corruption 
of the Stuarts, and submitted to the rude 
hand of Cromwell, to reach the station where 
it stands, has nothing which need make other 
nations despair or even doubt while their ap¬ 
prenticeship is still.going on. The reign of 
Terror has stained our history with some 
pages more bloody than the history of Eng¬ 
land, but she has none more shameful. I 
know nothing in the annals of any modern 
people which equals the political degradation 



Sect. XYIII. 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


273 


of England under tlie despotism of Henry 
VIII., without honour at home and without 

i 

glory abroadnothing which surpasses the 
baseness of parties under Charles II., when 
the most enlightened men were the accom¬ 
plices or the dupes of such a sanguinary 
impostor as Titus Oates, when both govern¬ 
ment and opposition were competitors for the 
bribes so infamously systematized as to have 
become salaries from Louis XIV., the most 
formidable enemy of their country. 

Such disgraceful facts will not allow us to 
believe that the nation which bore them 
can be endued with any superior virtues. 
That nation has, however, risen in her 
strength and in her liberty ; and for nearly 
two centuries she has been working her way 
to the first rank in modern society. But how 
and why ? Because her institutions, carefully 
preserved and perfected by a long experi¬ 
ence, afforded her legal and natural means 
of repairing her errors and recovering 
her dignity; because English Kings have 
fortunately had neither the power nor 
opportunity of absorbing the life of the 

T 


274 POLITICAL STABILITY. Sect. XVIII. 

nation into their own authority; because 
the tutelary forms and fundamental princi¬ 
ples of parliamentary government survived 
all storms, and opened to the successors of 
those servile and venal assemblies the way 
to a prompt and complete rehabilitation. It 
is through these efforts—these struggles— 
by the perpetual gymnastics of political life, 
and solely through them, that the national 
character has become gradually purified, ele¬ 
vated, and strengthened. 

The institutions of England have not been 
founded by its public spirit—it is they that 
have created, maintained, and often saved 
from suicide that public spirit which, much 
as we may admire, it would be still better if 
we could imitate. 

It is but little more than a century that 
modern England has enjoyed that plenitude 
of liberty which her constitution was pre¬ 
paring for her. Through what bloody 
struggles, through what long eclipses, through 
what cruel trials and hazards, has she not 
had to pass before arriving to that full and 
peaceful possession of herself! How often 


Sect. XVIII. 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


275 


from the reign of King John to that of 
George II. has the honest and patriotic 
Englishman not had to doubt of the future 
destinies of his country, of the triumph of 
right, and of the maintenance of his dearest 
liberties ! Those who have persevered—who 
have trusted—-who have hoped against hope, 
have been finally successful; but it has been 
only by courage, by patience, by a robust 
faith in the good cause, and in good sense, 
that they have been finally rewarded by the 
possession and enjoyment of that constitution 
which has cost them so dear, but which is 
worth all its cost, and which has won for 
them the admiration of the most elevated 
minds, from Montesquieu to the Comte de 
Maistre. 

Such is the conclusion and encouraging- 
lesson which English society offers to those 
who might feel their faith in liberty and 
their confidence in a limited government 
shaken by recent events in France. Such 
also is the consolation it offers to those who 
prefer the proud and patient resignation of a 
defeat to a dishonourable accomplicity in the 

t 2 



276 


POLITICAL STABILITY. 


Sect. XYIII. 


triumph of what they have all their life long 
either fought against or despised. 

Enlightened by such great examples, let us 
accept the passing humiliation under which 
Liberty now lies as a deserved chastisement 
for the ingratitude, the folly, the spirit of 
discord and disorder by which we have so 
cruelly abused its first benefits. But let us 
continue to believe in it, and let us endeavour 
by the trials that we suffer to acquire for us 
and our posterity the merits in which we have 
heretofore failed. We are walking indeed in 
darkness, but still in a road that we know— 
which we have seen by daylight, and which 
on the return of daylight we shall recognise 
again. Eclipses surprise children only, and 
frighten none but savages. Let us pass 
through these dark intervals with unbent 
heads and tranquil hearts. Let us endure 
with that “sad and intrepid aspect” that 
Bossuet describes the fickleness and the insults 
of adverse fortune,— 

“ Donee fortunam criminis pucleat sui.”— Phced. 

Let us resist scepticism as well as fanaticism, 
and hold out against .those who profess in- 



Sect. XVIII. POLITICAL STABILITY. 


277 


difference in politics, as well as those who 
would proscribe all safeguards and all inde¬ 
pendence. Next to our faith in Divine truth 
and Infallible Authority, let us also keep our 
faith in the noble instincts of our youth—in 
those principles of liberty, of justice, and of 
honour which alone constitute here below 
the strength and the dignity of the humblest 
individual, as of the greatest nations. In the 
midst of the discouragements, the hesitations, 
and the apostacies which surround us, let at 
least our voices and our lives remain faithful 
to our past —Manet immota jides. 


THE END. 


LONDON : PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET, 

AND CHARING CROSS. 























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